Thinking Out Loud: Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative
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History of the Dudley Neighborhood
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1. The Dudley Street neighborhood is one of the poorest communities in all
of Massachusetts, with a population of 24,000 Cape Verdean,
African-American, Latino, and white residents and with one of the
highest rates of unemployment and poverty anywhere in the state. We're
not a district, we're not a neat political unit; we are basically an
area that was defined by devastation and poverty, an area that has
suffered in a number of ways—suffering sometimes even caused by
well-intentioned policies and practices. The cumulative effect of this
devastation was that by 1984 the Dudley Street area had been reduced to
1300 abandoned lots filled with rubble. You could stand in the middle
of the one and a half square mile area that we call the Triangle, and
you could literally turn in all directions and not see a building. It
was an absolute wasteland, where once there had been a thriving
Irish-Catholic and Jewish community.
One of the programs contributing to the changes taking place in
Roxbury was the G. I. Bill, which encouraged returning servicemen and
their families to go and build homes in the suburbs. And over the years
many people did leave the area. Redlining, abandonment, and neglect
followed. When immigrants came in from Cape Verde and Puerto Rico, the
community changed its character still more, and again people left. The
Dudley Street neighborhood became an enclave for the poor and the
disenfranchised, and in many cases residents were not citizens of this
country.
There were a lot of slumlords in Roxbury who were hoping for urban
renewal to make them rich. They were waiting for the same thing that
had happened in the West End and the South End of Boston. They were
going to hold on to their property until they could make a financial
killing. But the community said no. They didn't want urban renewal, and
they stopped it. As a result you had a lot of people holding land and
buildings they didn't know what to do with. They realized they weren't
going to make their "killing," but they were determined they weren't
going to suffer, either; they were going to minimize their loss. The
way many of them did this was to burn their buildings down. Night after
night after night there were fires. Everyone on the outside said, Oh
look, they're burning down their own homes, they're destroying their
own communities. What's wrong with those people? It was not the people
living there who were destroying their community; it was the slumlords
who were burning down their own buildings in order to collect as much
insurance money as they could on what they perceived to be a lost
cause. They burned until the whole area was virtually flattened.
Imagine 1300 abandoned lots in the middle of a community!
("The Wisdom That Builds Community")
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2. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) is a nonprofit
community-based planning and organizing entity rooted in the
Roxbury/North Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston. DSNI's approach to
neighborhood revitalization is comprehensive including economic, human,
physical, and environmental growth. It was formed in 1984 when
residents of the Dudley Street area came together out of fear and anger
to revive their neighborhood that was devastated by arson,
disinvestment, neglect and redlining practices, and protect it from
outside speculators. DSNI works to implement
resident-driven plans partnering with nonprofit organizations,
community development corporations (CDCs), businesses and religious
institutions serving the neighborhood, as well as banks, government
agencies, corporations and foundations. The Dudley Street Neighborhood
Initiative has grown into a collaborative effort of over 3,000
residents, businesses, non-profits and religious institutions members
committed to revitalizing this culturally diverse neighborhood of
24,000 people and maintaining its character and affordability. DSNI is
the only community-based nonprofit in the country which has been
granted eminent domain authority over abandoned land within its
boundaries. ( DSNI Website)
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3. The wisdom we gain from our process for the most part comes from
sitting around with a group of residents attacking a
problem and realizing that what we need to solve the problems facing us
is collective wisdom. Bucky Fuller said that as each human evolves, we
each represent a potential way the universe could have evolved in terms
of the principles embodied in how we develop. We want to tap
as many of those universes as we possibly can. And that's really what
the process at Dudley Street is doing.
In 1987 a comprehensive plan was developed with the assistance of a
consulting firm called DAC, International. That plan laid out the
vision for the creation of an urban village. It integrated housing,
economic development, delivery of human services, and open-space needs,
offering a model for a twenty-first-century village. This village
suggests a certain scale, which limits the kind of businesses we're
looking for: we don't want an anchor store or industry. An anchor is
something rigid that you plop down to stay in one place. We're looking
for trimtabs. Bucky Fuller said the trimtab is one of the most
important principles of what he called comprehensive participatory
design science. If you understand a whole system, you'll understand
that there is at least one place where you can apply a trimtab, which
is a nautical or aviation term.
In order to change the direction of a large oceangoing ship cutting
through the water at a good clip, you have to apply a great deal of
energy because the ship has built up momentum and the water has
density. You have to overcome the momentum of the ship and the density
of the water in order to turn the rudder. If you know just where to
place a little flap at the trailing edge of the rudder, right above the
surface of the water, you can turn that flap relatively easily. When
you do, it creates a partial vacuum that turns the rudder, and then the
rudder turns the ship. So if you understand whole systems and know
where to place the trimtab, you can change the course of large systems
with minimal effort and energy. You don't really need that long a
lever; no, give me the trimtab. It's a good strategy to look for that
trimtab instead of an anchor or a savior. We're looking at the trimtab
approach to developing the community.("The Wisdom That Builds Community")
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The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative created its own governing
board, a 29-member board of directors elected by the community every
two years to guide the Initiative's planning and organizing efforts.
These are public elections. Candidates for office campaign, and they
take their role as community representatives very seriously. Who plans our community? Not the experts. We'll use experts, but we
don't want them to come and tell us what to do. We may consult with
experts in order to understand how to get something done once we have
determined what it is we want to do. It's the community that then
selects the developers and the architects. The architects have to come
and present their designs at community meetings, and the residents do
turn out for these meetings. This is participatory democracy and
participatory planning at work.
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4. Civic alchemy is about process. The reason so many people are afraid of
the process is because it's messy. But there's no way around the
messiness. Community process is muddled. It's time consuming,
it's aggravating, it's frustrating. If done right, though, it's also
beautiful, and it works. We're always teetering on the cusp between success and
failure, order and chaos, and that is the honest truth. In a process
like this, because there is so little precedent for what we're doing,
we are always teetering on the brink. Our success depends upon the
faith we have in the process. There are times when the muddles get so
bad that we've gotten stuck on a point for three or four days or even
weeks. The inclination for most folks would be to say, That's it. Or to
let the director or somebody else come in, make a decision, and get it
done. But If you allow the process to go through,
what you will understand is that the breakthroughs often come as a
result of breakdown. When the process breaks down, we have to say, We
can't do it within this framework; we have to jack our thinking up to
another level.
("The Wisdom That Builds Community")
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