The Endless Summer Continues..

International Honors Program, Cities in the 21st Century 2009, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Okay, so I'm totally smitten with the art of photography, but after spending time over the last year or so browsing Vimeo, I'm really starting to get drawn to the medium of video. Check out these videos I found of the cities that I've visited; it takes me back to Sao Paulo in ways that even my best photos of Diadema could never even touch.

Urban Age :: São Paulo Film from OutrosFilmes on Vimeo.

A Question from Rowan on Vimeo.

Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo.

Oh, and tonight's my last night with my host family here in Hanoi. We leave for a retreat for the next week, and by next friday I'll be on a plane heading east once again, this time over the pacific ocean and back towards the united states. This blog started off in earnest in January as a vehicle for me to get in touch with people back home, organize my thoughts, and attempt to write poetically about urbanity and my travels. I would say that my travels are about to end, what with my impending flight back home and my upcoming move-in to a dorm back on campus for the summer (woo free housing!), but to be a pretentious prick about it, I hope that I'm never finished "travelling" or ever done with keeping an eye open to my surroundings and finding things to write about. I know this blog got a bit sloppy here and there over the past few months, and that it was difficult to write effectively and intelligently when there were so many better things to be doing (like seeing penguins in Cape Town!), and I feel like I definitely lost my focus on what I wanted to write. My professor read most of these entries and went so far as to say I was a bit "undisciplined," but that's what I get for not actually keeping this journal on the topics that the original assignment required. Nonetheless, I'm thinking I'm going to keep this blog running, post-IHP, just as an opportunity to keep my soapbox around, should the desire come about to air our some grievances, post some photos, and ruminate on midwest and cascadian urbanity. My entries from Brazil (particularly those in Sao Paulo) make me homesick for the congestion, chaos, insanity and intensity of Rua da Consolação, and I've decided its not enough to just take photos of my meanderings without attempting to coherently piece together whatever it is I'm thinking about. WIth over 400 unique visitors to my blog, and over 1000 page views, I guess someone somewhere likes what I'm doing, so I'll keep it up.

My summer stands to be pretty interesting; I'll be doing a project on the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis, and perhaps this blog will help chronicle the stories of an undergrad way over his head in the world of socially-minded academic research. I'm also hoping to do some serious roadtripping around the upper midwest this summer, and since the horizon of the end of 2009 brings possibilities of stories of extended time on student government, potentially hammering out an honors thesis, taking a 200-level biology class (why the hell did I sign up for that?!) and all the other drama that waits in the wings, it'll be fun to blog about all of it. There's "Contested Urban Space" in every city, and perhaps I'll find some neighborhoods in Minneapolis worth writing about this summer. Plus, by blogging, I can make a statement against using the asinine piece of idiocy that is twitter.

Meanwhile, I've got about a week until I get back to Portland, and since I've posted Vimeos of the three cities I've lived in, I'll post one more as to what I'm looking forward to upon my jetlagged return to the City of Roses.

My Pretty Portland from The FREELS Brothers on Vimeo.

New York, New York, USA - Jan 19 to Jan 29
São Paulo and Curitibas, Brazil Jan 30 to Mar 4
Cape Town, South Africa Mar 5 to Apr 10
Hanoi, Vietnam Apr 11 to May 15th
Portland, Orygun May 15th to May 23rd
Saint Paul, Minnesota May 23rd through August

"Vietnamese girls put on the pounds"

Vietnamese girls put on the pounds
http://www.hoilhpn.org.vn/newsdetail.asp?CatId=123&NewsId=10678〈=EN

The beauty of Vietnamese girls is legendary. The image of charming girls riding bicycles along streets with long black hair falling over slender shoulders is engraved in many memories.

However, 20 years of innovation and modern living has turned many slender girls into fat ladies jogging and exercising around parks and lakes in an effort to lose weight.

Like many Western women, Vietnamese sisters are now faced with obesity, something they had never contemplated before.

Perhaps the best part about this article? This comes straight from the Vietnamese Communist Government's "Women's Union," an organization that is supposed to mimic civil society and stand up for "women's issues" around the country.

- hat tip to my roommate here in Vietnam, Jacob Koch, for finding this article.

May Day in Hanoi's Lenin Park.

May Day in Hanoi's Lenin Park., originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

After a minor case of illness that might as well have been Swine Flu, and a mysterious set of medicine and massage therepy by my wonderful host mother, I'm back and healthy and looking forward to the conclusion of my study abroad trip. I'm not exactly sure what pills those were in those tiny envelops she gave me, and exactly how that peppermint ointment massage works is beyond my Western understanding of medicine and biology, but I'm at full strength and greatful nonetheless. I'm also excited to report that after my group presentation on bicycles in Hanoi tomorrow, I'm pretty much done with all of the academic work on this program. Things are going well here in Hanoi; the group has chilled out a bit, and I'm really looking forward to our retreat next week. I'll be back in Portland May 15th, and stick around long enough for Papa Brown to buy me a beer for my birthday. Are you going to be in town between the 15th and the 23rd? Wanna hang out before I skip over to the Twin Cities? Send me a message, fool.

Gentrification in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa

Gentrification in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Much of the orthodoxy and writing on cities suggests that cities should be read as organisms; millions of disparate, tiny parts working and interacting in various ways to grow, progress, and manuever, and evolve while hopefully avoiding death or distinction. While the city-as-organism model definitely has a handful of flaws (as outlined in our UPSE reading from new york), I think that it is a helpful way to approach the million dollar question about neighborhood sucession and gentrification.

Gentrification in the United States brings about a very particular sort of storyline. The script suggests that a poor, usually nonwhite innercity neighborhood attracts the attention of investors and Richard Florida, creative-class single white yuppies who like the "gritty feel" of the built environment and its proximity to some revived central business district. The renewed interest in these area is often promoted by municipal subsidies desperately clamoring for a tax base and eventually creates a price raise on rents and everyday goods,thus pushing out the original inhabitants of the neighborhood to flagging first ring suburbs or cheaper parts of the country.This plotline seems to fit a handful of situations nicely; detractors bemoan that it's happening in New York's Harlem, it's happening on Chicago's Upper South Side, it's happening to Portland's Alberta Street, it's happening in many American cities where factories, warehouses, and decrepted slums turn out to make great places for condos and Starbucks for childless hipsters and vegan advertising directors.

What's frustrating is that this story is simutanously horrifyingly true and painstakingly false at the same time. As we learned in our case study of "gentrifying" neighborhoods in Cape Town, various sections of the city are always undergoing change and succession and evolution. The whole "city-as-an-organism" thing wouldn't really work if the same neighborhood held the same people with the same backgrounds and same occupations; in fact, the most exciting and original urban spaces I have visited and studied are collected vestiges of dozens of different economic, political and social uses of the landscape, mixed into one gigantic cornocopia with new uses for old people, old buildings, and old street patterns. In short, I am trying to instill that the gradual shift of one neighborhood from occupying one set of characteristics to another over the course of history is inevitable, and hardly something that is a necessary evil.

So when does gentrification happen? If, in the case of the Bokaap, a neighborhood becomes more and more expensive, and residents choose to move out of the neighborhood to cash in on their newly valuable property, one could argue that residents were acting on their own free will, and that very level of agency means that the changes that happened in that neighborhood were not ones of gentrification but instead of one group of people leaving while another entered. This becomes even more intruiging when one considers that the residents who are most adverse to changes in the Bokaap are of a much older generation than those that are about to inherit valuable property and are socially more inclined to cash in on their property for a piece of property out in the northern suburbs. However, many of the changes in the Bokaap neighborhood were not brought about by the free agency of the neighborhood; the rise in tourism, while one of the largest reasons for their increase in housing value, has also craeted unfortunate circumstances, such as the fact that now many restaurants in the Bokaap serve alcohol. If the pattern of lifestyle in the Bokaap is severely disrupted (as in, families in the Bokaap no longer shop at their local stores because of religious custom against alcohol), couldn't this be an example of a neighborhood responding to external factors to make the original inhabitants less welcome in their original community? Is THAT gentrification?

Ruminations on Sapa

, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Sapa is a remarkable gem of a town situated precariously in the mountains that form the northwestern border of Vietnam from neighboring China. An overnight train and an hour's van ride up a narrow, windy, almost nauseating one lane road leads us to the town advertised in every tourist book, shop and postcard they sell back in Hanoi. Even with all of the photos in my lonely planet book and my own level of familiarity with the small village town (I visited Sapa with my father on vacation three years ago, and eagerly organized a trip up on our IHP stay in Vietnam to share the experience with my friends) the small tourist getaway exudes an aura of distance and removal from the rest of the world; perhaps its that awkward border town of Lao Cai where you deboard the train, or perhaps its the psycological aspect of waking up at a god-awful early morning train station to catch a bus, but without exoticizing the town too much, the surrounding small villages around Sapa really do feel about as far as one can get into the "periphery" away from the world of the 21st century. While the village has hotels, ATMs, and amenities abound, and the town has seen rapid economic development as a result of the blossoming tourist destination (I definitely saw buildings and hotels that were not there when I last visited), you can't "develop" your way out of Sapa's freeing feeling of isolation and remoteness that comes from the stunning, terraced valleys that spread in all directions from the center of the small town. Sure, you may know that an hour's descent back to the railroad station might bring you back to the world, and Sapa is no stranger to internet cafes or the English language, but the sheer journey itself, the boundless mountains, the uncharacteristically cool air and the joy of putting as much physical and psychological distance as one can between their life (back in Hanoi, Europe, the US?) and their body (the Sapa trail to Lon Bac village) make the trip to Sapa one of the most memorable parts of my trip on IHP.

The bummer? I don't think that tourism is ultimately having a net positive impact on the Sapa community. The hills aroudn Sapa are dotted with villages and rice patties maintained by the legions of ethnic Vietnamese minorities (H'mong, Dzao, among many others) that live in the area, and many are understandibly becoming wise to the ways of European languages, bartering and sales. Unfortunately, the way that tourism is being conducted and the large-scale social structures that are perpetuated by tourism dollars may not be currently the best possible vehicle for economic and political empowerment for a largely disadvantaged, impoverished community. I staunchly hold the believe that tourism and travelling can be a force of good in the world (after all, I'm on IHP, I would have to be pretty self-hating or non-introspective if I hadn't cleared that with myself), and when one considers that each tourist spends anywhere between 20-60 bucks in the Sapa economy on meals, souvenirs, tours and hotel rooms, this is quite a lot of money to suddenly start flowing into a valley town that originally was just the largest market in the region for farmers to try and trade their goods. I couldn't get over how many women and children (all young girls) from age 40 to age 4 were ready to speak in fluent english to convince me to buy a scrap of fabric or souvenir; "you buy from me!" they plead, almost all wearing their traditional ethnic clothing with the dyed blue wool.

Here are some policy recommendations for making tourism in Sapa socially sustainable and responsible.
1) Get them kids in school. and pay them to be there. Kids are understandibly choosing to support their families and make their own money by acting as tour guides and taking tourists up and down the foothills to look at all of the villages. While the young girls are making money through this system, they are undoubtedly receiving much less than the tourists paid, since the money seeps through so many middlemen in the travel agency business, and more importantly, every day missed in a classroom context is another possible missed opportunity for economic and political empowerment. While children should obviously feel no pressure to leave their own culture and their own customs behind, and I am taking efforts to avoid romanticizing life in a small ethnic minority community up in the Vietnamese mountains, I do think that education provides the true opportunities for everything from better managing the family farm to finding ways to live a happier life. I feel that without education, these young girls at ages 8, 9 and 10 will in a few years suddenly be too old to give tours, stripped of their innocent cute demeanor that sells so well, and without education they face a bleak life of poverty with the only prospect of skimming a few dollars off of the tourists coming through the hills. The tourism agencies need to institute minimum ages for children to be giving tours, and the schools need to provide economic incentives to keep their kids in the classroom. This happened in the South Bronx, where The Point paid students to get good grades and get involved politically in their community, why couldn't extra tourism dollars fund that?
2) Destroy the gender barrier. This one is really simple in definition, yet difficult to fix. Until we were miles away from Sapa, we saw virtually no local men. While all of the local H'mong women had walked for literally two hours to get to Sapa before the sunrise to greet the vans and buses of tourists with their trinkets to sell, the men remain back at their houses. While it is understandibly problematic to interfere seriously with the gender roles that are largely vestiges of the H'mong tradition, many of the girls we talked to complained that their husbands/brothers weren't tending to the rice fields but instead were "being lazy" or drinking alcohol. There are unfortold reprocussions to this sort of world of gendered economic possiblity, not least of which the increase of sex tourism and kidnapping from across the Chinese border. Young girls need the same opportunities as young boys, and tourism in Sapa cannot expect to produce positive effects on the community if it is so reliant on creating a gendered division of labor.
and
3) Impose a two or three dollar surcharge per ticket on travel agents in Hanoi to go towards a general community development fund. This fund could go towards these new education programs, a microfinance program, a rainyday fund to help prepare for droughts or landslides in either rainfall or tourism, or could even be used to start H'mong and Dzao-owned tourism businesses. You could have the community elect a local council to ensure the efficient spending of these resources, not unlike Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting scheme. Plus, this could really help direct some funds towards roads and infrastructure (water) developments to make sure that farming remains a viable option for families throughout the province.
4) In Lao Cai or elsewhere, develop a student interchange program. I guess all of my policy proposals are really heavy on education, but perhaps thats what I get for spending so much of my weekend in Sapa with children under the age of 18. Some sortof exchange program to get kids out of the village into other educational programs could provide an interesting cultural exchange for all, and might encourage more scholarship or more attention towards the plight of the ethnic minority tribes.
5)A new, specific bureau of government affairs to manage tourism. I have read and heard complaints that the Vietnamese government is a bit slower to act to help the ethnic minorities who live up in the hills; many think that the H'mong are "backward" and the increasing urban/rural divide and pace of Vietnam's economy/globalization are surely not helping bridge this divide. I think that a specific entity of the Communist Party, similiar to the Women's League or the existing Minority League, that would specifically monitor and set goals for progressive tourism policy could be a large step forward.
6)Address the problem of mass-made tourism trinkets. When every single shop sells the exact same scarves and scraps of silk, it's obvious that there's no local entrepreneurship going on here. This is counterproductive to the notion of tourism as bringing up a local community; it merely means someone somewhere has found an object that tourists in Sapa are willing to buy, assuming its "authentic." Exploration should be made in finding ways to produce local trinkets on site in Sapa and pumping the money from unique, handcrafted cultural souvenirs back into the aforementioned fund.