The Help-Yourself City by Gordon C.C. Douglas

Author:Gordon C.C. Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, with little more than a nice thought and coincidence, community involvement in a project can bring itself. When an Oakland man named Dan Stevenson epoxied a small stone Buddha statue to a rock in a planted median strip in 2009, he was just trying to discourage loitering, vandalism, and illegal dumping on the spot. He isn’t religious, he was just tired of garbage and signs of criminal activities at the corner near his home. (He had called the city countless times, but the problems had not let up.) He thought perhaps having something else on the spot like the Buddha, which his wife had bought at a hardware store, might discourage some of the trouble. Yet Dan soon had fruit, flowers, and other offerings showing up on his doorstep from grateful neighbors—members of the area’s large Vietnamese community.19

Worshippers, many of them older women originally from Vietnam, soon began visiting the Buddha every morning, and before long they had constructed a wooden shelter around it and added other features—flowers, flags, and more Buddhas—to complete a sizable shrine on the corner. Trash dumping and other signs of disorder seemed to decrease, according to residents nearby, and statistics show a drop in crime in the area.20 When the city’s Department of Public Works tried to remove it in response to a complaint, the outcry was so strong that the city gave up. Members of the immigrant community and people from all different backgrounds continue to worship at the shrine, and have now built a second one at a similar corner a few blocks away. The Buddha, placed by a non-religious white man, was received by his Vietnamese neighbors as a gift, and even inspired them do more.

Back in LA, I asked Steve Cancian to take Deborah’s project as an example and consider how it might have been better implemented to avoid local backlash. His response was to suggest taking a more collective or backseat approach to developing DIY improvements, involving local leaders as he had when working with Hood Builders in Oakland, and the then-leader of the group, a man named Big Will:

If they had actually developed local leadership who were actually making the decisions and deciding what to do, the local leadership wouldn’t prevent her deciding to do that! So it wouldn’t have been an issue. Now they could have . . . like Big Will did, in the forebears of Hood Builders: Big Will knew the neighborhood and used whatever I brought to the table and said, Hey we could do this. But without Big Will it wouldn’t have been targeted in the right way to actually work and be an improvement without being gentrifying. [ . . . ]

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