The 6 January storming of the US Capitol was described as violating hallowed ground and American democratic values. It followed former president Donald Trump signing the Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture on 18 December.
The order directed that federal public buildings “uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public ... classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings”.
Trump’s promotion of classical architecture was a return to 100 years ago when the City Beautiful movement was fashionable. Originating at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, City Beautiful aimed to tidy up cities aesthetically, hygienically and morally. Parks, boulevards, monuments and classical-style buildings were staples. Civic pride and social order were to be their by-products. While this cleaning up of cities increased sanitation infrastructure, it also displaced “less desirable” people and their ways of living.
The executive order capped a year in which Black American George Floyd’s death during his arrest on 25 May prompted anti-racism protests in public spaces designed to uplift, beautify, inspire and command respect.
Slave trader Edward Colston’s statue was dumped in Bristol Harbour in the UK. Ghent’s bust of Leopold II—responsible for atrocities in the Congo—was smothered, had “I can’t breathe” written on it and was dismantled in Belgium.
In New Zealand, Hamilton City Council removed the statue of John Hamilton, who led the 43rd regiment in the Battle of Gate Pā in 1864, and Gisborne’s Captain Cook statue was graffitied with swastikas and the words “Black Lives Matter and so do Māori”.
American legal scholar Professor Stephen Clowney has used the term “landscape unfairness” to refer to public space designs that “make selective accounts of the past seem normal”. The protests spoke to the harm of such lop-sided history-telling and their clash with the values built into these spaces.
New Zealand has its share of antiquated monuments, like those of George Grey, Marmaduke Nixon, and Edward and William Wakefield. We still honour the unscrupulous dealings of the New Zealand Company when we traverse our capital’s inner-city streets named after its founder, directors and associates, like Boulcott, Courtenay, Lambton, Molesworth, Vivian, Wakefield, and Willis.
It’s only in 2019 that space was made available in Parliament’s debating chamber to commemorate those killed in the New Zealand Wars in among equivalent memorials of overseas conflicts. This persistent blindness is one reason the inclusion of New Zealand history in the school curriculum is vital and can’t come soon enough.
Another American legal scholar, Professor Sarah Schindler, has identified a more pernicious form of discrimination—what she calls “exclusionary urban design tactics”.
While Clowney’s examples align closely with the subjects of last year’s statue toppling, Schindler’s appear as benign civic infrastructure providing amenity for a community. However, she points out their discriminatory aspects: park benches divided by armrests into individual seats to prevent homeless people sleeping on them, Parisian boulevards that hamper revolutionaries protesting, and motorways routed to eliminate poor and minority neighbourhoods—known in the US as “white roads through black bedrooms”.
New Zealand’s history of the built environment is clearly not immune from discrimination—whether it be the displacement of ethnic or poor communities by means of ‘’slum’’ clearance, motorway construction or gentrification, or Pukekohe’s segregated cinema and swimming pools, documented in Robert Bartholomew’s book No Māori Allowed (2020).
Public toilets oblivious to gender diversity, footpaths too narrow or too steep for wheelchair use and contextual risk factors such as alcohol outlets and fast-food restaurants located in poorer suburbs that increase rates of obesity and violence are other examples of designs and planned environments that disproportionately affect specific groups in society in negative ways.
Built discrimination endures because it is often hard to change and knowledge on its own is not enough. We need changes in the way we think about and develop the spaces and places we live in. As the New Zealand Productivity Commission has noted in its Better Urban Planning report, spatial segregation, social exclusion, concentrated poverty and proximity to polluting or environmentally destructive industries harm wellbeing, and it is the already-disadvantaged communities that are disproportionately affected.
Both the Black Lives Matter protests and the assault on the US Capitol were expressions of frustration at a lack of meaningful access to political power. At the heart of any discrimination is power inequity. New Zealand needs a resource management and planning regime wise to the mechanics and consequences of discrimination in order to confront current inequities and prevent future ones.
The forthcoming rewriting of the country’s Resource Management Act will provide a good opportunity to achieve this.
Christine McCarthy is a senior lecturer in the Wellington School of Architecture at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She is a former president of the Architectural Centre and is the convener of the annual New Zealand Architectural History Symposium.
Read the original article on Stuff.