atlas(t)

offensive place names with Hasan Minhaj

decolonized area rapid transit

the amazing poet, graphic designer, and cultural worker Kenji Liu (who is on the board of Kearny Street Workshop, where I work) just decolonized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with this map above, which he created by committee on Facebook. Click here to see the discussions (in comments) on version one, and here for version two.

Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

More thinking needed on this.

But in any case, Kenji is still refining his map, so go visit the Facebook posting and contribute ideas!

sources of white stress

just another quick drop-in here: the somewhat controversial Village Voice article "White America Has Lost Its Mind" (quick aside: love that the title is declarative rather than interrogative, as most such articles are) had the above map of the fearful white mind included. Kinda fun.

mapping stereotypes

via Woffy, this hilarious collection of maps showing how Europe looks to various Europeens. Not a new idea, but still a funny one. Fortunately, this all doesn't really require commentary, but you might be interested to know that this is all the work of one UK-based designer.

Below is the map of how Europe looks to the U.S. Enjoy!

my chapbook is out, yay!

i've been very bad about posting here, I know, but it's because I've been busy with a bunch of things. One of these is a chapbook being published by Aqueduct Press, which is out now!

(Although someone pointed out that, because it's perfect bound, it's not technically a chapbook.)

Yay! My little book, called Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles, and is available NOW at Aqueduct Press' website! (Click on the "orders" button and scroll down.)

Right now, for the holidays, the book, usually $12, is $9, so get it now! Also, the book is part of a series called "Conversation Pieces," which you can subscribe to at $80 for 10 consecutive subscriptions (and you can choose which title to start with.) I've read a handful of these titles and they're all worth it, so you might consider a subscription, or make it a gift for the feminist or progressive geek in your life.

OMG, I'm so excited!

parag khanna world map

Just sticking my head above the parapet long enough to post this cool cool vid from TED of Indian American geopolitics dewd Parag Khanna talking about borders and the world map. Yay!

A Tale of Two Koreatowns

there's a fight going on between LA's Koreans and Bangladeshis over district naming. In the area known (and mapped), but unofficially, as "Koreatown," the growing Bangladeshi community has asked for a portion in the center of Koreatown to be named, officially, "Little Bangladesh."

The proposal has angered longtime residents who have worked hard to promote the district as a Korean cultural destination and economic hub. City officials, meanwhile, worry that neither side is taking into account the full diversity of an area that is also home to many Latinos and Thai Americans, among others.

More than a name is at stake. Although largely symbolic, the recognition afforded by a special district designation can help establish a community within the cultural mosaic of Southern California, said Hamid Khan, executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Network. When noted on maps and street signs, it can also attract visitors and help local business.

I remember visiting Koreatown throughout the 90s, and all anyone ever said was that there were more Latinos than Koreans in Koreatown.

I think such district naming has less to do with who actually lives there, and more to do with recognizing a particular minority that is (supposedly) only found there. There are no efforts to name Koreatown anything Latino because all of LA is considered Latino.

Two things may be happening here: the first is that Koreans are no longer perceived as being restricted to Koreatown. Perhaps Korean businesses and residents have become so ubiquitous, that they're now perceived to be a universal LA minority, rather than one contained within their enclave. The second is that, in the past decade, Bangladeshis have become a substantial minority.

Although the 2000 census counted just 157 Bangladeshis in Koreatown, a survey conducted five years later by the South Asian Network and the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research suggested a population of 6,000 to 8,000, Khan said. Since then, the Bangladeshi American community says that its numbers have swelled to more than 10,000.

I'm not commenting on what's right here, just on how demographics are changing. Used to be, immigrants of color took over enclaves from European immigrant groups; now they're taking them over from each other. So much for API solidarity.

In other news, the owner of my local cafe just informed me that I live in Koreatown, Oakland. I didn't know that. Turns out, a Korean business owners association voted to create a Koreatown Northgate Oakland Community Benefit Association in 2007, and have been active for the past half-year in doing stuff like getting the Koreatown designation for Telegraph between 20th and 35th approved, buying banners for the street, and starting a blog, which has, so far, only reported on a stolen trash can (but here's hoping.)

Sure there are a lot of Korean businesses and community centers in this area. But the area is still mostly black. And the Korean businesses aren't concentrated. Some of the best restaurants are above 35th, and there's a strip mall around 40th. Also, ground zero for the primarily white gallery center of Oakland's monthly Art Murmur event, is between Grand and 26th along Telegraph. So an argument could be made for this area being designated some sort of artist game preserve.

I don't really care what it's called, but I see the issues, is what I'm saying. I guess they need to designate someplace Koreatown -- if they need to do it at all -- but the area chosen seems somewhat random ... or maybe simply chosen so as not to step on toes. Get much above 40th and you're into the "Temescal" shopping district. They already have banners. Get much below Grand and you're into the new condos-and-entertainment district called "Uptown." They've already sunk a lot of money into bringing the downtown "Uptown" back ... money that's looking like thrown away since the subprime mortgage crisis.

I wonder if it will make a whit of difference, is what I'm wondering.

design: e2

so, back to reviewing atlas(t)ilicious TV shows on Hulu.

The one I've had my eye on for a while is Design: e², "the Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious," a PBS show about sustainable architecture around the world. (Actually, the show is "e²" and the "design" portion of it is about architecture. The architecture series was the first season, in 2006, and the show is now in its 3rd season. The "Design" part appears to be the only season that's available on Hulu, just so you know.)

It's fashionably shot, with the pictures desaturated of color, the edges of the frames out of focus, and slick, generic images of cities and scenes looking curiously static as they combine with Brad Pitt's voice overs. I don't like the stock-photo aesthetic, but I have to admit that it's easier on the eyes -- particularly when you're trying to pay attention to concepts -- than your standard documentary-style show. And most of the talking is done by talking heads -- architects, critics, curators -- while Pitt's voice overs frame the show and add pseudo-poetic touches ("What would Walt Whitman say about sustainable skyscrapers?" Seriously? Is that because Whitman's the only American poet they can be sure their audience will recognize? Did they need to Insert Poet Here?)

The Green Apple, their first episode, focuses on sustainable buildings in New York. This means: 4 Times Square, the new Bank of America building, and the residential complex of Battery Park City. The series, as exemplified here, doesn't tell a story, but rather goes for case studies. But the show tries to dumb the information down to be palatable. This is the worst of both worlds: a narrative structure can carry a lot of information and make it go down easily; a case study structure doesn't move/flow like a narrative, so it has to be interesting and full of information. Neither is fulfilled here, so there are awkward moments when a talking head is trying to say less than they could say in the same amount of time, and there are long explanation sequences when everything is told vaguely and abstractly. It's boring. The show wastes what little time it has, yet seems to drag often.

But there are good arguments made here. Various talking heads point out that high-density cities like New York are far more energy efficient than any low-density residential areas. The products of energy -- heat, light -- are shared willy nilly, and with environmentally conscious design, can become even more efficient.

The second episode, "Green for All," is very different, focusing on a project involving ridiculously photogenic architecture students designing sustainable homes from local materials for poor third world folks, in this case, the Yaqui Indians. Yes, it's another fine episode of "What These People Need Is a Honky," but relatively inoffensive at that, because the focus of the show is not on the political or social dynamics of bringing sustainable architecture to dirt-poor indigenous Mexicans, but on the design itself, which is actually pretty cool.

Of course, the design is underlain by the political and social dynamic, and the hierarchy of personality in this episode is distinctive, and disgusting. Architect Sergio Palleroni is not merely profiled, but gaggingly worshipped, both by the show and by his gaggle of beautiful architecture students. It's all about the genius of Palleroni, not coincidentally a white man. The beautiful architecture students, although mostly male, occupy the position of the beautiful white female in this narrative: adoring, help-meeting, eye-candyish. And, of course, the student picked out to be profiled and followed is, indeed, a lovely young, blonde woman. Yak.

At the bottom of the pole is the Yaqui Indians who populate many frames, but are not identified by name or personality. A translator is interviewed, and some of the grateful recipents of Palleronian largesse are interviewed, as the camera invades their homes. Argh.

Nevertheless, the design is fascinating, the ideas are wonderful, and I only wish that Palleroni and company thought to educate Mexicans in how to design and build their own homes, rather than blonde Texans.

I didn't get any farther than this in my watching because, at base, this show is a bit boring. It goes for generic, as I said above, and achieves it. The design of the show itself, its aesthetic, is very IKEA. I was interested in the ideas, but the show throws as many obstacles between the viewer and the ideas as it does bridges. I'm glad this show was created, but I hope, like reality TV, sustainability TV proliferates, and improves along the way.

alien land and freedom

just for the fun, let's juxtapose two stories this week about Asians coming to California and dealing with land ownership.

The backdrop is the California Alien Land Law of 1913, a law repealed in 1952, which prohibited people ineligible for American citizenship, primarily Asians, from owning land. This was part of a raft of racist laws aimed at controlling Asian immigration, including barring Asian laborers from entry, and restriction of commercial fishing licenses to citizens.

One of the long-term consequences of this series of laws, which began with the Naturalization Act of 1790, was that Asians, although a substantial presence in the US since the mid-19th century, remained permanent foreigners -- literally alienated from the land -- in the American imagination. So, jumping ahead a century or two, how's this gonna play with 1) a conflict between government and squatter farmers, and 2) Chinese real estate carpetbaggers?

The Hmong community of Fresno is the second largest Hmong settlement in the States. Earlier this fall a Hmong community garden created without permission 13 years ago on public land was threatened when the city decided to take back the land to build a police station.

There are 20 gardeners feeding around 300 people from this 4 acre plot. Over time the gardeners got grants and acknowledgment from organizations, with the approval of parks and recreation, but no formal permission. But then parks and recreation transferred the $750,000 parcel of land to the police, and the gardeners were supposed to be out by Nov 1.

The community looked to a new parks director to help them and at first he was enthusiastic.

He envisioned a cultural center, a park, carving the garden into smaller plots involving more people from all over the city, walkways, statues. It would be called the National Hmong Friendship Garden. The plans cost $2,500.

"He had plans drawn up. They were beautiful, expansive," says Edie Jessup, director of a hunger nutrition project with Metro Ministry. "We were all impressed. But then he said, 'By the way, it's up to you to raise the millions of dollars.' "

Of course, the garden was partly about growing food for a community that was "still struggl(ing) with poverty and food bills." City officials said the police department served the community as a whole, and that was that.

After protest and advocacy -- and the great article in the Fresno Bee I linked to above -- the city tried to arrange to move the police station to another site, but the plan was kiboshed when the city council tied on the vote. Now the garden has to move, although it hasn't yet.

Given the same state, and the same time frame, we have a much different second story: Curbed SF tipped me off to a new trend in China: organizing real estate trips to downturn-hobbled San Francisco, LA, and Vegas to buy up foreclosed homes.

As we have learned, the combination of rising housing prices in China and the appreciation of the Renminbi coupled with declining real estate prices in the US and the depreciation of the US dollar, has already become an impetus for Chinese investors to buy properties in the US. Besides, due to the continuous appreciation of the Renminbi, it is more cost effective to shop in the US. At the same time, the US sub-prime crisis has forced the prices of some of the mortgaged houses to drop, increasing the interest of some investors to go house hunting.

Apparently, half these folks

plan to buy houses when the US housing market is at its low level so that they can keep their children company when they study in the US. "My daughter started school in the US in August this year. I might as well buy a house if it is really cheap and I can visit her by the way," said ... one of the registered members.

Because of the decline of foreign students from the Islamic world due to post-9/11 immigration difficulties, 57% of foreign students currently in the United States are from Asia.

Okay. On the one hand, we've got a classic immigrant grit story superimposed on a group of refugees from a botched American war. They are traditionally agrarian, they're poor and dispossessed, they've squatted government land, and their welfare is not considered to coincide with broader community welfare. On the other hand, we have our greatest fear: an Asian superpower rising to meet us at a moment when our economy is faltering and our military superiority isn't doing us any good; citizens of that superpower are replacing us in our very own, white-picket-fenced dream homes, and not even living there but using them as edu-dachas!

The first is an age-old enclosure of the commons issue updated to post-Cold-War racialization, where the enclosing force is actually public ownership of a more institutional sort. The second is a new (or is it age-old?) situation: the US as exploited, exploitable land. This will be the first time since ... I don't know ... ever? ... that the US. has had foreign carpetbaggers coming in to take advantage of the mess we got ourselves into. And our family homes are now being colonized by the very people the US colonized in the mid-19th century. Does this make them Asian Americans, or are they going to be something else, something new?

Are these just the same old themes playing out yet again? Are we seeing new trends in immigration, land, ownership, conflict? Are there similarities in these two cases?

Discuss.

Crosspost.

race map of britain

a few days ago I was hanging out with a friend, a South Asian immigrant who grew up mostly in England but has lived in the States for a decade. She made an offhand reference to how much she hated England ... something I had never heard from her before, although we've been friends for about seven years.

I pressed on the point and she--shocked that she's never ranted to me yet--explained that, although (especially since 9/11) there's a lot of anti-South Asian prejudice in the States, it's nowhere near the level of daily hatred and harrassment a South Asian in the UK faces. Last time she was home, it took only 18 hours for her to get her first racial slur hurled from a car.

In the course of her rant, she mentioned a map that had greeted her on the front page of The Independent during one trip home. This was a race map that didn't show percentages of racial groups in England, but rather the chance that random pedestrians on the street would bump into someone of a different ethnicity. (facepalm/) Naturally, this led to a much more dramatically "colored" map than a simple population percentage map would have been.

Of course, I went looking for the map and it wasn't up at The Independent's site, but urban cartography had it in the archives. Here 'tis, above. And here's the explanation of the "method" used to produce such a highly colorized map.

Experts devised a "diversity index" based on the probability that any two people chosen at random from a particular area would be from different ethnic groups, even if neither of them are white. A score of 0.5 means there is more than 50 per cent chance of this happening -- and the area is classed as highly ethnically diverse.

Think about this for a minute. They're not going by absolute numbers, which is to say, how many people, or what percentage of people are what ethnicity. They're going by probability: what is the chance that people on the street will bump into someone of a different ethnicity. Depending on how they choose to do this (and they don't identify the "experts" doing it) they could be seriously inflating the impression of diversity--or danger--in these areas.

Additionally, they're talking about people meeting on the street. Is there any controlling for ethnic factors like the women of one community not going out as often as the women of another community? Or for the fact that a lot of these communities are concentrated in ethnic enclaves, so you wouldn't actually meet them on the street unless you went into their enclaves?

What this is, is an incendiary map intended to stoke racial suspicion. It's about the daily experience and perception of otherness. Think about the wording: what are your chances of meeting an outsider on the street! They're everywhere! On your streets! Look at how much chance you have of meeting an outsider on the street all over England! England is stained! Publicly stained!

Basically, they're counting on their readership not understanding the math, and especially how math and perception work together in sociological issues such as these.

Just an example of how maps can obscure and obfuscate as much as they illuminate.