by Mike Davis. Protest - Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style

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Protest: Mike Davis

Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style

In the weeks since President George Bush’s speech in New Orlean’s Jackson Square, in which he promised to spare no effort in rebuilding the area, FEMA has alarmingly failed to advance any plan for the return of evacuees to temporary housing within the city or to connect displaced locals with reconstruction jobs. In fact, new barriers are being erected against their return. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metropolitan New Orleans, landlords, galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values, are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)
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The New Urbanism Meets the Old South
Into this fraught and sinister situation now blunders the circuslike spectacle of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU), the architectural cult founded by Miami designers Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ). Twenty years ago, when Duany was first barnstorming the nation’s architecture schools and preservation societies, New Urbanism seemed to offer an attractive model for building socially diverse and environmentally sustainable communities based on a systematization of older City Beautiful principles such as a pedestrian scale, traditional street grids, an abundance of open space, and a mixture of land uses, income groups, and building forms. In practice, however, this diversity has never been achieved.
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Duany whipped up a revivalistic fervor that must have been pleasing to Barbour and other descendants of slave-owners: “The architectural heritage of Mississippi is fabulous…really, really marvelous.” With Gone with the Wind as their apparent script, the CNU teams spent a frenzied week trying to show the locals how they could replace their dismal strip malls with glorious Greek Revival casinos and townhouses that would rival those that once existed on MGM’s back lot. The entire exercise stayed firmly within the parameters of a gambling-driven heritage‚ economy with casinos “woven into the community fabric,” and neo-Taras rebuilt on the beach.
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Mike Davis teaches in the history department of U.C. Irvine. His forthcoming book is Planet of Slums (Verso). A portion of this article appeared on Mother Jones’ blog on October 25.

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