GregBaker_Oct21-2011

8/3/2019 GregBaker_Oct21-2011

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This research focuses on the division of a community based on infrastructural goals of acity whose main economic source had become obsolete. Oakland, California was the end

of the Southern Paci c railroad, and the neighborhood of West Oakland where the stationwas located is now a collection of smaller enclaves among a network of freeways, borderedby a light rail line and state buildings. The corner of Twelfth and Brush streets is a strip ofland located in a marginalized historic district with high visibility from the freeway feedingdowntown, offering an opportunity to memorialize the struggle of West Oakland while at thesame time attracting the attention of workers commuting into downtown from the suburbs.

The problem with the kind of redevelopment taking place is that the shoppingmalls and condominiums and public art do not communicate anything about the vibrant

community that once existed there as part of the industrial culture that was destroyed.Physical destruction for new transportation routes shaped peoples mental and emotionalmaps of West Oakland... putting in the freeway [Grove-Shafter] meant razing houses anddestroying the neighborhood ( American Babylon , Self. p 158). Architects and developersare working to make the nancing of these projects come to fruition and are not concernedwith the lessons of modernism. Highly criticized for making cities unlivable, modernistideology called for the separation of the city according to land use. Rather than integratingthe redevelopment projects along the coast of the San Francisco Bay into the rest of theurban fabric, there is a commercial center in Emeryville and a residential center in WestOakland, with the freeway system as the main link between these places and out to the restof the bay.

One analytical lens that acutely focuses the topic of this research is the tactics of theSituationists. Through the techniques of drifting about and creating spectacles in the parts ofParis slated for redevelopment, they sought to spread public awareness of so-called blightedareas that are actually thriving and full of working class life. Situationist methods activelypoliticized urban conditions and, according to some authors, in such formulations, the city

and its architecture become not just aesthetic objects but dynamic, practical relizations ofart, unique and irreplaceable works and not reproducible productspolyrhythmic composi-tions of linear and cyclical times and different social spaces, born from many labors (Things,Flows, Filters, Tactics. The Unknown City . Bordan, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro. pp 16-17). Thatthese many time-spaces as they exist(ed) in the city become urban art in this way maynot be enough for West Oakland to recover from the economic forces as they have playedout, it will be essential to create a public awareness of the racial segregation that continuesthrough these new projects. How, then, can an architectural solution capture the essence ofthese time-spaces in West Oakland?

THESIS ARTICLE V.2

ABSTRACT


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DOWNTOWNOAKLAND

WESTOAKLAND

EASTOAKLAND

OAKLANDHILLS

CHINATOWN

FREEWAY

POST OFFICE

BART

MUSEUM

TRANSIT

ARCHITECTURE

MODERNISTINFRASTRUCTURE

AIRPORT

INDUSTRY

SHOPSPACE

POLITICALRESISTANCE

RESIDENCE

INDUSTRIALGARDEN

COLORLINE

AFRICA

EUROPE

ASIA

SITUATIONISTINTERNATIONAL

ALGIERS

BY-PRODUCT

GUY DEBORD ELDRIDGECLEAVER

RICHARDAOKI

IDEOGRAM


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From my vantage point overlooking Pill Hill in Oakland, I feel a serene sense of calm. I

am also overlooking the main axis from downtown Oakland off to the hills, UC Berkeley, andCCAs main campus: Broadway. In the section where I live, the street has been renamed

Broadway Auto Row. The car dealerships that used to be where the Whole Foods Market is

located are all here now. There are also a number of auto mechanic and auto body shopshere. The close proximity of residential, commercial, and industrial uses has been a major part of Oaklands development. When it was chosen as the terminal point for the Southern

Paci c, what was once the largest Oak grove in the United States began its rapid transfor-mation.

The other main axis in Oakland was Seventh Street, leading along the waterfront fromdowntown to the Point. The Point is now known for the underground tube of the Bay Area

Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system that links San Francisco to the East Bay, but it was oncea vast, bustling railyard. The wealthy, especially owners of downtown real estate and relo-

cators from the 1906 earthquake, immediately settled in the hills in Piedmont and areas thatwere soon annexed by Oakland. They were eeing the new industrial landscape, but also

found bedrock that is more stable in an earthquake and better views. Because of this, Oak-lands geological strati cation is linked to its social strati cation.

USGS online spatial data for Google Earth

GROWING THE MEDIAN GROVE


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From those redwood laden hills come three rivers that make up the watershed of Oak-lands brackish Lake Merritt, once featuring an open channel to the bay when it was knownas San Antonio Slough. Ships used the slough to collect redwood lumber for use in the con-struction of homes across the bay in San Francisco. Once so full of waterfowl and sh thatit was a major Ohlone hunting ground and settlement, the channel was slowly lled in ac-

cordance with the street grid and railroad lines until 1926 when the tidal gate was installed,nalizing the transformation from San Antonio Slough to Lake Merritt. Through a combination

of industrial pollution and the reduction of the channel to 4% of its original size, cutting off es-sential supply of oxygen levels at the lakebed, the environmental effects were felt as early as1939 when trucks had to haul away over a ton of dead sh. Dumping restrictions in the lakeremained loose until the 1962, when a severe ood prompted the installation of a new oodgate and scientists stepped in to increase tidal ow in an effort to heal the ecologically im-balanced water body. A massive restoration project, which began with aeration fountainsinstalled in the mid-Nineties, now seeks to further improve tidal ow, build new parks, andreduce the twelve-lane road from 1949 that crosses the old channel to a six-lane road.

Despite the severity of the ecological crisis in Lake Merritt, nothing is being done toalleviate the social crisis that has plagued West Oakland since around the same time as the

sh died in the lake. Because redevelopmet efforts severed West Oakland from essentialservices, African American women living there at the time began to construct reciprocalrelationships of exchange and mutual dependence that provided newly arrived familieswith essential goods and services.( Amerian Babylon , Self. p 56). The onset of the American

involvement in World War II brought a wave of African American migration from the Southto ll positions in the shipyards of Oakland; thus there was a boom in African Americanhomeownership in West Oakland. These new residents were welcomed by the Black womenalready living there, and by the end of the war a vibrant community had sprung up alongSeventh Street. After the war ended, many African Americans could not nd new work, andovercrowding caught the attention of city of cials. With the passage of the Housing Actof 1949, allowing cities to voluntarily elect blighted places for redevelopment, all of WestOakland was deemed blighted by the Planning Commission. Home demolition began in1954, the same year of the rst public proposal of the Nimitz Freeway to run along CypressStreet. By the end of the decade, West Oakland had been almost completely fractured bythe presence of three interstate highways, nalized seven years later by the addition of theBART line along the harbor and through the nal stretch of Seventh Street out to the Point.Quickly realizing that the stories of the displaced people were the only thing left to hold onto, West Oakland community leaders founded the biweekly newspaper, The Flatlands , inorder to give biographical account of the memories that were being lost on a daily basis tothe new practices of eminent domain ( City Against Suburb , Rodriguez. p 57).


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This distinction between the low-lying, middle class areas of the East Bay, known asthe atlands, and the upper class hills that overlook the bay is central to the placement ofthe freeway system in Oakland. The MacArthur Freeway, closed to trucks and focused on

getting passenger vehicles to and from East Oakland and the Hills, shares its name with theBoulevard running underneath it, containing much of the local traf c that the freeway ismeant to bypass. The areas of East Oakland closer to the harbor and the airport are servedby the Nasty Nimitz Freeway, full of commercial truck traf c, connecting the East andSouth Bay areas to the Bay Bridge and the rest of northern California. The Grove-Shafter Freeway is a direct link to downtown Oakland from the Hills, allowing the wealthy downtownlandowners to access their parking garages directly from the freeway without driving morethan a few blocks on the local streets. The freeway extends beyond the Hills in the other direction (as Highway 24), through the Altamont Pass to upper-middle class suburban citieslike Walnut Creek that have been growing both in size as well as in the number of jobs andattractive urban amenities since the completion of the freeway and BART systems.

Further related to sociogeological strati cation, the signage re ects the perceptionof the freeways by the assumed origin and destination commuters. Signs on the Grove-Shafter Freeway (which is both Interstate 980 and the portion of Highway 24 running throughOakland) refer to it as Highway 24 when traveling outbound toward the Hills, and as Inter-state 980 when traveling inbound toward downtown Oakland and the Nimitz Freeway (listing

overlay of authors depiction of vehicular paths


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San Jose as a control city). Many residents of the Hills are more comfortable associatingwith Highway 24, which is designated as a scenic highway, whereas Flatlands residents havelittle association with the name Interstate 980, designated in 1981 near the completion ofthe freeway. The construction of that freeway lasted over twenty- ve years, while all of thehousing demolition had already been completed. During this time period, a far-left politicalgroup called the Black Panther Party rose and fell, centered around issues of eminent

domain in West Oakland. In fact, no signs list Interstate 980 by itself. Even the inbound traf csees the Nimitz designation, Interstate 880, directly below the designation for the 980. Inmany ways, however, it was the BART line that spurred the most political controversy. Riotsin the Sixties can be compared to the May 1968 riots in Paris, both associated with leftistpolitical groups.

In the case of Oakland, the civil unrest of 1966 and 1967 was based on unemploymentof African Americans, which was up to 20%. Out of the 30% overall unemployment rate inOakland, African Americans composed 60% of those at the time. And although the BARTsystem brought new jobs and ran straight through West Oakland, no jobs were offeredto Blacks until federal intervention enforced an af rmative action program at the end of1967. In order to tell the history of infrastructure in Oakland, one must also tell the history ofa civil rights struggle that still has major rami cations today. If the Situationists in Paris wereable to raise political awareness through the political urban geographies of their mappings,what would a similar tactic produce in the context of West Oakland? Whether or not theplanners, developers, and architects of redevelopment in Oakland are aware of it, theeffects of their efforts are creating a modernist future in which geography is divided by land

use. The current transit infrastructure in the Bay Area relies on the specialization of eachlocality. Therefore, local interests were largely ignored by the transit district that was estab-lished to implement the system. In the case of West Oakland, the backlash created so muchcommunity activism that very few victories could actually be won because of all the stake-holders. Today, West Oakland still sits badly in need of urban renewal, not the continuedreinforcement of the area as blighted and in need of redevelopment. After fty years of thesame awed strategy, it is time to reinvent transit in West Oakland for the third time.

Rather than do anything to the freeway, or add any new infrastructure, the rst wayto reimagine transit is to properly direct people to all places that are signi cant, such ashistorical districts. This idea is based on thinkers like the Situationists, but also Henri Lefebvreand Michel de Certeau, who theorize about the effects of everyday life and habitual travelthrough ones daily routine on patterns of production and consumption. If historic districtsare brought to peoples attention, pattern of movement through the city might be slowlyaltered over time. This idea must be expanded to include the politicians who mediate our lives by their decisions in regards to the infrastructure that we use to move through cities. Onthe downtown side of I-980, Preservation Park is a small historic area with early 20th century


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homes where people have small public service of ces and outdoor weddings. On the WestOakland site of I-980, Oak Center is a large historic district that suffers from municipal neglect.The residents of the small district fought for three years in the early Sixties to save hundreds ofhomes from demolition (Self. p 148). The mediation between the disadvantaged landownersin the area and the wealthy owners of downtown land who actually reside elsewherebecomes implicated by the existence of the freeway. Historically, the owners of downtown,

or city center, land, took residence in Piedmont and the Oakland Hills. Today, the moneyhas only slightly shifted hands, with more city center landowners living in house boats or moving back to San Francisco such as author and real estate investor Mr. J. Brad Lampley.The habitual routes for people who frequent the streets of Oakland are in uenced by thedecisions made by politicians who only direct people downtown and not to the other areathat also carry historical designations. One possibility is to render the shifting patterns of landownership as a positive contribution to the conservative political climate and begin to swaythe political af liations in the city center.

authors depiction of vehicular paths


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The volume of traf c has shifted as well, though at the moment it is dif cult to understandthe reason for this. The bulk of traf c exiting into downtown came from the Nimitz Freeway

just eight years before the time this essay is being written, and over the next six years thatpattern reversed. Now the people entering downtown Oakland are coming from either San Francisco or the Lamorinda suburban area. The cities along Highway 24 from Walnut

Creek to Berkeley are af uent suburbs: Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda are referred to bylocals as Lamorinda. Regardless of where they are coming from, people exiting I-980 arenow driving along a sensitive boundary and their visual attention is critical. A young womanwho grew up in Oakland and lives with her parents in Lafayette to save money for graduateschool while she is paid half of minimum wage to work at a nonpro t to increase literacy inOakland schools exits I-980 at Twelfth Street, adjacent to the historic Oak Center district thatis completely unmarked. Signs at the intersection of the frontage road, Brush Street, andTwelfth Street all point toward downtown. Signs for City Center, Chinatown, the OaklandMuseum, and other historic sites all direct people in the same direction on Twelfth Street,away from Oak Center.

authors representation of traf c data from California Division of Traf c Operations


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The decision to route the freeway underground in a downtown area echoes the BARTsystem, and its routing underground for the downtown areas of San Franisco and Berkeley aswell. Trees were planted along the freeway not only to prevent erosion, but also to providelandscaped views from the homes along the frontage roads and so that drivers can enjoythe shade and greenery. Bridges were built along many of the existing roads, but much of

the horizontal continuity between West Oakland and the city center was destroyed. Thishorizontality is what made it possible for groups such as the Situationist International in Paristo invent psychogeography and the drift through a city. This is not an open horizontality likethe modernist urban ground plane of Corbusier, it is one lled with buildings and placesseemingly bypassed by religion, capitalism, and modernization... visible reminders of therelentless processes of history, of class struggle, of the contingency and impermanence ofrepressive regimes, destined to the same fate as any other socioeconomic arrangement(The Situationist City , Sadler. p 100). The freeway here negates all of these architec-tural and urbanistic qualities, instead focusing on organization, speed, specialization, andcontrol. These four points are used by author Joseph Rodriguez to describe the BART system,but the transit patterns in West Oakland all exude a sense of these four elements (p 52). Ifmodernism has its roots in the Athens Charter of the International Congress for ModernArchitecture, which sought to achieve rigid zoning according to different functions, theninfrastructural redevelopment in Oakland has a modernist agenda. Rodriguezs four qualitiesdescribe modernist transit that becomes the basis for projects using municipal funds.

authors photograph


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Thus, once the scope of the transit system was established, federal and municipal projectswere placed at its adjacencies. Some projects, such as the Oakland Museum and BARTadministration building, usually claimed a few blocks at the expanding borders of ethnicneighborhoods (Chinatown in these cases), effectively limiting their growth and bufferingtheir transit adjacencies. Other projects, such as the Acorn Residential Area, used

federal low-income housing programs to demolish existing homes in favor of standardizedgovernment townhomes. Oak Center was already approved for such a project whenresidents organized against eminent domain, and instead received redevelopment fundsfor use on rehabilitating their homes. Such grassroots action would be continued in theimmediate future during the civil rights movement in Oakland, which was composed ofmany community organizations (Self. p 221). Probably the most (in)famous of these groupsto come out of Oakland was the Black Panther Party in 1966. The general rhetoric of civilrights efforts to revitalize the Black community in Oakland centered around the idea of self-determination, by which political marginalization could be overturned by organization intoan acting political body. The Black Panther rhetoric, however, was centered around resistingrepression of the people, and sought allies across race, gender, and sexual orientationto solve the same problem. Meanwhile, in Paris, the Situationists were publishing materialdescribing the Black Power movement as a revolt against the commodity, framing theissue in terms of a new escape from enslavement, this time to the commodity. In the UnitedStates today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it(Situationist International Anthology , Knabb. p 200), read the tenth issue of their publication,released in 1966. Although the Situationists were particularly reacting to the Watts riots, their

analysis of the Black Power movement contextualizes both struggles in a global framework ofradical politics.

In order to continue the legacy of these groups within the discipline of architecture, politicalmemorialization will take the form of an urban by-product. Between the situation, in thiscase the I-980 with its frontage roads, and the program, Oak Center, must exist a mode ofarchitectural operation between speci c circumstance of modernist redevelopment andthe conceptual overlay of urban renewal. A by-product occurs in this space, the combi-nation of a physical strip of space and the act of approprating it, to belong to both sides:the concept and the situation ( By-Product-Tokyo , Neustupny and Bertram. p 21). Thus, anarchitectural by-product should serve to capture the essence of the space as it has existedand now exists; the essence of its time-space. Oak Center represents the power of acommunity to resist repression, and the corner at Twelfth and Brush streets is an opportunityfor architecture to intervene by drawing attention to the struggle against marginalization.Out of the striated landscape of a modernist transit and redevelopment system, any attemptat architectural memorialization must be activated by recognizing the existing programsrelationship to the new situation.


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Bertram, Nigel, Shane Murray and Marika Neustupny. By-Product-Tokyo. Melbourne,Australia: RMIT University Press, 2003.

The essay by the authors, included along with student projects from a study abroadstudio in Tokyo, provides the theory of the by-product existing between situation

(speci c circumstance) and program (conceptual overlay).Davis, Ann Leslie. Undoing the 1950s: The Death and Revival of Lake Merritt. Oakland

Magazine. Sept-Oct (2011): 45-49.

This article is a concise summary of hydrology issues as they relate to transportationinfrastructure.

Gutman, Marta Ruth. On the Ground in Oakland: Women and Institution Building in anIndustrial City. Dissertation, University of California, 2000.

This graduate essay follows a school teacher on her path to a make-shift school inWest Oakland, giving an account of what development was like as it was centeredaround the Southern Paci c Railroad. It gives a particularly vivid account of how theoriginal street grid was meant to function.

Rodriguez, Joseph A. City Against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American Metropolis.Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Selections from this text reveal the regional effects of the BART system, with particular focus on the development of shopping in downtown San Francisco, the movementof jobs and homes to the outlying suburbs, and the economic disenfranchisement ofOakland in the process.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

This book is a useful account of the Situationist International as an architectural group.Much of the book focuses on how they were successful at drawing public attention tothe issues they felt were affecting urban life in areas of Paris deemed as blighted.

Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton:Princeton UP, 2003.

This text provides a complete history of Oakland, especially in the years directlyfollowing World War II and into the suburbanization process. It is thus an excellentreference on housing and the history of labor in Oakland.

Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets,2006.

A catalog of all Situationist texts and issues of the journals allowed identi cation of textsrelevant to the discussion of radical politics and contextualization of the Black Power movement in the United States from a European perspective.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Ed. Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr,Jane Rendell, and Alicia Pivaro. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

The introductory essay to this compendium outlines how architects can understandcities and effectively intervene in them. The article by Dolores Hayden offers insight onhow to commemorate the public history of under served communities.


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I. Introduction

A. History of Oakland

B. Contemporary problems facing Oakland

C. American Bablyon

II. Transit - Development

A. Southern Paci c Railroad

B. Key System

C. Bay Bridge

III. Transit - Redevelopment

A. Freeways

B. BART

C. Blight and Eminent Domain

IV. The Situationists

A. Leftist political groups

B. Blight and Media attention

C. New Babylon

V. Conclusion

A. Urban renewal

B. Transit reform

C. Proposal

OUTLINE

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GregBaker_Oct21-2011