29.4.09

This is the street where I live in Ha Noi.

There are numerous, wonderful charms of the city of Hanoi. Coming from Cape Town and Sao Paulo, it would be pretty easy to write about the almost complete lack of crime in the streets, the lack of divisive social/racial antagonisms splitting the city apart, or the absurd affordability of a bowl of pho noodles. Cape Town and Sao Paulo so efficiently stood as manifestations of Mike Davis' geography of fear; gigantic walls, shocking socioeconomic inequality, and a disquieting nagging feeling of walking aroudn in a dystopian neoliberal global cities made the cities so fascinating to visit, and the last three weeks in Hanoi, while fraught with culture shock and food-related illnesses, have given me at least a glimpse of the way the Urban Global South can follow alternative trajectories. This is not to gloss over Hanoi's struggles in governance (rigid), transportation planning (don't even ask), or the gradual influence of increased investment from foreign entities. It's just that in so many ways, seeing Hanoi through the eyes of this International Honors Program (as opposed to the lens of a tourist as I did three years ago) has piqued not a moral outrage about urban social inequality the way Cape Town and Sao Paulo did but a curiousity about a different narrative of development and economic advancement.

This is a wordy way to say that, while I could write about so many pleasant things in the city of Hanoi (and so many tiny little frustrations that make me anticipate my May 15th arrival in the United States even more), I think that I'm most drawn to the way the city feels like a patchwork quilt of thousands of streetside, Vietnamese renditions of Edward Hopper's infamous Nighthawks Painting. Whether getting up at five in the morning or arriving home at from the late shift at eleven at night (and the Vietnamese work ethic propels many to choose both), the cityscape is covered with impromptu, informal little pho vendors serving out the same food for any meal of the day. Usually lit by harsh flourescent, office park luminaries, it's possible to see groups of Vietnamese, young and old, men and women, huddled in tiny plastic chairs along the streets at any time of day, fighting the humidity with a glass of bia hoi and engaged in friendly, warm conversation. Many a writer has ruminated on The City as a place for lonliness and alienation and contempt for existentialist nihilism that comes with being around so many unfamiliar people, but the tiny pho noodle vendors and their makeshift, portable restaurants set up in streets and gutters and sidewalks and first floor living rooms are emblematic to me of an alternative way to acheive a sense of belonging and a sense of meaning. This is, of course, enhanced by Vietnamese culture's strong preference towards kinship and powerful family ties, the Hanoian humid climate that refuses to unstick to your body, and lack of housing space that therefore encourages citizens to spend their evenings outdoors and outside of family houses. In short, it'd be difficult to build such outdoor communal spaces in Minneapolis in January, or in any city where the vast majority of the citizens can easily hop in their cars back to the outer suburbs to spend their afterhours in climate-controlled, cable television anonymity/bliss.

These feelings of urban anomie are, at least to me, the night owl, exacerbated late at night; in Portland, I can't count the number of good nights shared with friends at 2 in the morning at Hotcake House or Coffee Time. So in Hanoi, where the city veritibly shuts down at eleven every night to get ready for the next early morning, and every single bustling store has closed its gates for the evening and the streets loom largely unlit, the tiny florescent lights at the corners of intersections that illuminate a ten foot white bubble forming a delineated space of social interaction and a good bowl of cheap food, is, to me, the antithesis of alienation in the city.

Good lord, I should finish this paper. Since when did 1500 word essays become so difficult?

Go Blazers in games six and seven! Go Timbers in the homeopener tomorrow night!

Sharing some headphones and a view of the lake.

17.4.09

An Afternoon in the Old Quarter.

Looking back, I've come to realize just how many photos of football, bicycles, and coffee that I've taken on this trip.

13.4.09

Traffic in Ha Noi, Viet Nam

A numbers game.


Urban Retreat, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Sometimes, a little fresh air away from the motobikes and pho restaurants will do you some good.

I'm living just north of the old quarter in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, for the next four weeks. Jacob and I have about a forty minute walk by West Lake to where our classes are held, at the Ho Chi Minh Museum.

Let's go through some numbers and costs that explain the mood I'm in right now:
Pho: $1.30
Bia Hoi Ha Noi (Hanoi Draft Beer): $.13
Motorbike ride to class: $2.50
Time that the Liverpool/Chelsea game will be on next week, Hanoi Time: 2:40 am
Games left for the Portland Trailblazers until they play a playoff series, likely against the Rockets, and with as high as the second seed in the West: 2
Number of Years since the Los Angeles Lakers have won in Portland: 4
Points scored by Rudy Fernandez in 2 seconds against the Suns on national TV to end the 3rd quarter: 5
Opinion articles in the Oregonian's editorial page where the head of the BTA FINALLY came out against the Columbia River Crosing: 1
Number of times my host brother Lam said that my roommate Jacob looks like Jason Mraz ("he sing, 'I'm yorr'-horrr-hor-horrrs?"): 1, but it was funny
Time spent looking for this one happening bar with my friends Max and Kira, only to turn up empty when the cab driver dropped us off god knows where on the other side of town: 60 minutes
Number of international soccer games on our satellite tv right now: 4
Time at which I woke up this morning for breakfast: 6:15
Kilometers that a friend Max and I ran last Saturday night to follow a friend we met that night who was riding his motobike: about 1
Number of friends I've gotten to listen to the best band to come out of Portland in a while (and you know that's saying something,) Blind Pilot: dozens
Price of an ice cream cone along West Lake, on the walk back home from class when it's hot and humid: $.15
Number of great vietnamese propoganda signs I've seen: dozens
Days until I'm back in the states: 31
Days until I'm allowed to drink alcohol in states with the desired quantities I've managed to down here in Vietnam, South Africa and Brazil: 38
Days until I'm set up in some oncampus housing back at Macalester: about 50ish
Cost of living on campus this summer: technically free, but I'm sure there are some negative externalities about ten weeks in the dorms
Actual, meaningful blog entries I plan on writing for this over the next two weeks: 9 more to go (this one doesn't count)
Books I read on spring break: 2 (a kickass book on Kinshasa, the capital of DRC, written by an anthropologist and a photographer about the postcolonial struggles of african urbanism. and that Paul Farmer book everyone raves about)
Books on my to-read list for this summer: Seriously 25 right now
Photos left on my camera's memory cards: 1300
Photos I've already taken: about 5000

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietpoison

11.4.09

My favorite back alley in Hanoi

I missed Asia.

Cape Town and Environmental Justice

p>I had begun to throw the concept of "Environmental Justice" around in a few classes I had taken in the past year, bouncing the idea around like a pinball around in my head, sounding out the phrase and teasing out its implications. I thought about it in a handful of contexts, most often in my class with Chris Wells, US Urban Environmental History, although it had been difficult for me to have any emotional attachment to the subject until I wrote a paper about the demolition of a black neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota for the creation of a highway. Biking over Interstate 94 on my way to the Minnesota Historical Society to scourge for sources, the stark reality of a giant corridor dug out of the earth where a particularly poor, black neighborhood once stood became the image I carried with me to understand how the ability to shape, manipulate, extract and use "nature" is not evenly distributed through a society, and that discussions about environmentalism desperately need to be paired with discussions about political agency, social justice, and even racial inequalities. Landscapes, both urban and rural, are inherently laced with clues about which set of priorities and notions of little-e environmental philosophy are held by whichever set of power-brokers are in charge. It takes little work to notice that the distribution of natural resources across urban landscapes is hardly equal; access to recreational nature (beaches/parks), consumptive nature (food), resourceful nature (mining, energy production), and even Muiresque "preserved" nature (wildlife parks, reserves) are often controlled by particular groups of people in a society, and many others in society have to find their own navigation through these systemic inequalities to get access to the "nature" necessary for a sustainably lifestyle.



With this pretext, Cape Town is the most spectacular place in the world to study Environmental Justice. After spending the past few days muddling through clouds and dreary overcast skies in Curitiba and Buenos Aires, our subsequent few weeks in Cape Town reveal a pretty stark, blunt, monumental physical, urban, and social landscape. There are mountains, oceans, tons of open sky, exotic unique plants like fynbos, white people, black people, neither white-nor-black-but-still-maligned people, wealthy people, poor people, unmitigated pollution, virtually worthless systems of garbage collection and no ethos of recycling whatsoever, contests of modernity versus traditionalism, contests about the way the environment should be used between local, regional and global actors, influences on the landscape from places thousands of miles away. The story of Cape Town is just waiting for an astute reinterpretation of a city that has managed (and been managed by) world resources, people, and ideas for hundreds of years. The social and built landscapes of Cape Town are direct creations of an overarching society that likes to create dichotomies and social constructions about everything: urban/rural, urban/natural, black/coloured/white, wealthy/poor. Environmental Justice is not just a question of why black people in Langa don't have access to nice parks or suitable open spaces, but rather a pursuit to understand how a group of people managed to find different ways to differentiate and understand nature and people; rather, exactly who are black people anyway (and who decided that they are black?), and which ways are different subgroups of a population exposed to different sets of resources and experiences? It isn't enough to sit back and exclaim, "well, golly, the unsanitary garbage heaped in Langa's streets and the rat poison that is killing children in Khayelitsha sure is different and unequal from the way that Table Mountain and Cape Point have been canonized as sacred natural sites!" There are sets of political actors who are managing landscapes in this way; nothing is inevitable in the stories of cities.

This is to say that a certain set of political actors decided everything from which pieces of land (and subsequently which flora and fauna in the ecohotspot that is Cape Point, the world's smallest floral kingdom) would be preserved from significant human development, which people would be placed on which lands (and subsequently, how each group of people would have agency to affect/control their own plot), and how the resources in these different spatial locations will move about the city/metropole/region/country/continent/planet. I hate to make the comparison between "invasive species" and the racial subcategories of non-indigenous people residing in Cape Town because of the negative connotations implied by saying that certain people "don't belong," but the comparison is helpful, I think, in understanding that Cape Town has been created through so many contestations between subjects and objects originating both locally in the Western Cape and from far away colonizers in Britain and Holland and farther away colonized south east Asia. The skyscrapers, the style of the parks, the roads, the diets, the plants and animals, the racial constructions, so many tangible and intangible forces that constitute Cape Town exist thanks to a compromise between so many ideologies. I do find it helpful to think of Cape Town as a melting pot of so many different organisms that are fighting survival and for David Harvey's infamous Right to the City. Cape Town is a location on a historical trade route that has moved so many different people, plants, and animals onto the peninsula from so many different places around the world, be it commodities or people (or in the case of slaves, both) of British, Dutch, Indonesian, Malaysian, descent. Not all ideologies are weighted equal, of course; District Six as a delineated space within the city is currently the blank field that it is due to the historical shifting power balances and the different ways different ruling elites have tried to reshape the area for their interests, and the obvious historical ramifications of Apartheid have strongly shaped which people live in which areas and access which resources.
Some plants came to Cape Town and successfully took over the countryside (often with human help) both for human consumption and because they proved much more adaptable than the natural species of fynbos that originally grew.

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Perhaps the most rewarding part about studying Environmental Justice is to find the interventions against this form of spatial and resource-based inequality. Whether visiting the Edith Stevens park, a bastion of ecological protection in the heart of Cape Flats, or visiting the Sustainability Institute that found ways to compost their own shit, or listening to Lance von Sittert's presentation on the way Table Mountain is being reinterpreted through the stories and uses of black African history to give the mountain to all of the city's inhabitants, its heartening to remember that these environmental injustices never happen without a fight; there's always concerned people out there, attempting to stage their own event to counter these systemic inequalities. Instead of seeing the Mountain from the water as the perfect backdrop to the perfect, "nonAfrican" African city (as problematic as that is), I grew to really like the view of Table Mountain from Langa. Sure, the view from the east townships destroys the notion that the Mountain is perfectly, picturesquely flat, and the mountain is less image-worthy when the view is obscured by the power plant, underlying slums, and the like (especially considering you can't even see the mountain at night since we weren't allowed to go out at night in the first place), but then again, this is the way that the majority of Cape Town's citizens figuratively and literally see the mountain, and thus, it reflects a fascinating, sordid truth about life in the Mother City. You won't hear this story next year, when Cape Town hosts the 2010 World Cup; after all, urban planners took pains to place the stadium in the downtown City Bowl, where Table Mountain will be seen from the water on televisions across the planet. Yet discussing and acting on the political, economic, and environmental reasons that the view of Table Mountain from the East is so different from the view of Table Mountain from the West is the only way that these inequalities can be addressed.

Wish you were here, v4

spring break 2009

Wish you were here,


Wish you were here,, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Home sweet home in Langa.

I lived with Avery in Langa.

South Africa's Opposition Party, the DA, have a logo that looks oddly familiar.

Langa, Cape Town, with Table Mountain and Lion's Head in the distance.

Change your look? Yes we can!

Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa.

10.4.09

Ha Noi


Pigeon's head., originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Okay, so if this photo looks familiar, its because this photo is from that crazy Spring Break 2006 trip I took with Papa Brown. Photos of Vietnam 2009 are likely to be online soon, as well as our spring break and all the photos from Langa... Apparently I'm pretty behind. Dammit.

We have safely landed in Hanoi, and I'm surprised by the level of detail to which I remember how most of the downtown area is laid out. I even remembered specific restaurants, and I visited my old hotel about an hour ago.

. I have a ton more photos to upload, and since I decided to spend my time on that miserable 12 hour flight from Cape Town watching the Simpsons and furiously scribbling and doodling instead of writing in my urbanity journal I'm keeping for this trip, I've got about eight rough draft entries that I intend to publish over the next week.

This pigeon's head was delicious, for what it is worth. Tam Biet until then.

2.4.09

sb09 sa.


Oh snap., originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Spring Break on the northern Atlantic Coast of south africa for a wonderful week, starting tomorrow. After that, flying to Vietnam. Hope all is well in whichever corner of the world you reside.