Conscious Choice: Death and the Power of Place

May 1996

Death and the Power of Place

by Jim Schwab

Our sense of place is a spiritual thing. Our spirit can respond to a place only when it senses life. When we sense death all around us, when a place breeds a sense of death, we can challenge it only by drawing upon spiritual resources from another time and place, some place that fosters memories and sensations of life. The strength of that sensation is the wellspring that sustains us through the valley of death that loomed before the writer of Psalm 23.

Religion, to the extent that it is tied to our spirituality rather than to legalistic dogma, has long helped to foster our sense of life about the places we cherish most. "I set before you life and death," says the God of the Hebrew Torah. "Therefore choose life...."

Christians reaffirm such choices with a savior who rises from the dead. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Native American beliefs all appeal to some basic choice of life over death. And innately we sense that this informs our response to places we like or dislike. We get a feeling about them. We do not always articulate those feelings by linking them to choices of life over death. But that is what is at stake.

That we transfer this sensation to our feelings about communities is no accident, for cities and towns are themselves living organisms within the living biosphere. Why else do planners use the term "revitalization," based on Latin roots that mean, roughly, "to restore life," to describe their efforts at urban economic development? It is no accident that Jane Jacobs titled her seminal work on modern urban planning The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was posing the most fundamental question for us: What values do we want our urban form, the structure of our communities, to affirm? "Therefore, choose life..."

Because we are creatures of both memory and imagination, our relationship with any place we care about is an interactive one. Memory and imagination are themselves interactive, each living off the substance of the other. And with the help of both we make our communities and homes livable. Memory and imagination give us past and future, and the present in which we constantly live is an evolving tension between them. When change ceases to be possible, we die, and the usefulness of memory is thus extinguished. The same happens with the places where we live.

We can choose to heighten our sense of place by heightening our conscious awareness of this polarity between life and death in the features of our community that affect us most. Native Americans have long recognized that spirituality is innately tied to the power of place. When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in funding the development of badly needed subdivision housing on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, insisted on fences between yards, the clearing of trees, and other "crime-prevention" measures alien to the Menominee, one elder simply noted of the resulting place, "the spirit is not honored here." The Menominee, pioneers of sustainable forestry, have an organic spiritual relationship with their forest that was violated in the design of that subdivision.

Those of us who live in America’s great cities may not feel such a powerful identification with the forest, but we know instinctively that both the natural and institutional features of an urban place can either kill or enliven our spirit. Government offices, including many that serve the poor, seem designed to instill in their clients a sense of personal worthlessness. It is small wonder that the people in many unemployment and welfare offices have a sense of listlessness about them. Sitting all day in windowless, pictureless offices amid bland walls and broken metal chairs is not an activity designed to foster a sense of the possibilities of life. It is spiritual death.

In the environment we foster within our public buildings, we send powerful messages about the life we envision for those who must spend time there. These places kill not only the spirit of the intended victims but of those who oversee the murders. Only a few months ago, waiting on my foster daughter’s birthday for a simple ruling by a Juvenile Court judge that she had in fact turned 21, we sat in a building where the legally powerful reject the importance of anyone’s time but their own, thus asserting a sort of spiritual death sentence over all those consigned to the court’s jurisdiction, at least while they bide their time in that oppressive building.

Noontime approached, and we and two social workers had been there since the court opened, waiting even for a signal that we would so much as be called into the courtroom. My foster daughter’s assigned attorney from the Public Guardian’s Office, who seemed to have little else to do, could not find time even to greet his client and made no effort to move the agenda in the courtroom even to find out how long we all had to wait.

In my frustration, I indicated that I, unlike the ambulance chasers who infested the basement of Juvenile Court like cockroaches feeding on the offal of tortured lives, at least did something productive for a living and did not enjoy spending my time waiting for a call from judges and attorneys who had no time for my child.

"If you’re asking me if I do something productive for a living," replied the public guardian testily, "the answer is no, I do not."

Thus he acknowledged his own professional suffocation by an institution that reeks of spiritual death. Any idealism that once accompanied his sense of mission in working for the Public Guardian’s office had withered away. Cook County Juvenile Court, in deadening the spirit of thousands of youngsters yearly, had killed one of its lawyers as well.

The life and morbidity of a place reach our senses through a thousand and more symbols, all of varying sizes and significance, that tell us about nature or the designers’ relationships with other human beings and other life in general. People sense an equation between death and a toxic dumping ground, for example, or a landfill, or an incinerator. All of the disposal techniques we use for waste signal the end of the useful life of the materials that are being disposed of — in other words, their death. These facilities are either shallow graves, or cemeteries, or crematoria for materials we once deemed useful. Their death signals our lack of imagination for their future usefulness, hence their lack of a future.

It should surprise no one, then, that in combating the death of Chicago’s West Side, one of its most enduringly successful religious attempts at urban revival, Bethel New Life, has spent much of its time and energy in developing a viable recycling business. Bethel is about the business of giving new life to what David Morris has termed our "urban ore." This process is at the core of the justice that Bethel seeks for a revitalized West Side.

It is small wonder that waste disposal has been a central issue in the pursuit of environmental justice. Illegal dumping is the spiritual equivalent of the attempted murder of a neighborhood. Legal dumping that is concentrated in poor and minority neighborhoods and is unaccompanied by a serious effort at recycling — the process of giving new life to materials — also constitutes a form of communicide. After a judge in Virginia failed to find discrimination in a pattern of landfill sitings that concentrated such facilities in African-American neighborhoods, author Robert D. Bullard rightly charged at a Chicago environmental justice conference that the decision "equated blacks with garbage."

But the process goes on with buildings, even stately and often historic buildings that occupy much of Chicago’s predominantly black South Side. The buildings die because the powers that can finance renovation equate their surroundings with death, and the deaths of the buildings signal the expectation of death that soon overwhelms the neighborhood. It takes a sturdy spirit, a remembrance of better days and grander possibilities, to overcome the despair that one feels in walking the streets of the most depressed neighborhoods of any big city.

For those sturdy spirits, however, the difference between life and death is merely one of imagination, fed by the memory that death need not triumph. The most potent symbol of rebellion against the power of death in our cities is the reestablishment of our connection with living things. Life triumphs even without our noticing as grass springs up in vacant lots and nature ever so patiently spreads the seedlings of the future urban forest across abandoned brownfields. But the human spirit soars when humans are directly involved in fostering that life. We can imagine new growth in the midst of death, gardens and forests in the midst of deprivation.

In Baltimore, Gloria Hunter, an African-American grandmother, says she dreamed one day just a few years ago of an urban garden whose food would be grown by the very homeless people who most needed its bounty. It is hard to instill the power of life in those who have long been taught to expect death, and often Gloria is the only worker in the garden on a hot summer day, and she must draw on her deep religious convictions to remind herself that her dream has placed her where she belongs. But at other times, her clients are drawing new strength from a connection with nature they never thought possible.

In the San Francisco County Jail, surely one of the more stultifying places to spend any of the days of one’s life, another gardening project defies death by teaching inmates that they can achieve redemption by bringing new life into the world with their own hands. By the time they leave, some inmates love their work so much that they regret their departure. They return just to see the maturation of the seeds that they planted. The garden becomes a respite from the spiritual death that infests any large prison. But it is more than respite, it is renewal.

There are those, like Job Ebenezer, who also defy the spiritual death of our concrete urban canyons and faceless buildings. Atop the parking garage of the Lutheran Center, the O’Hare Airport-oriented national headquarters of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Ebenezer, the ELCA’s director of environmental stewardship, has defiantly planted an urban rooftop garden. Last year, Ebenezer and his volunteers harvested 13 tons of fresh vegetables, much of which will be provided this year to feeding stations for the hungry and homeless, replacing some of the canned food so ubiquitous in urban soup kitchens and food pantries.

Urban gardening is but the beginning of Ebenezer’s defiance in the face of urban hopelessness. A black native of Madras, India, Ebenezer is the grandson of a man who converted to Christianity two generations ago to escape the clutches of the caste system, then made his own personal statement of liberation by marrying an untouchable woman. An engineer with a doctorate earned in the U.S., Ebenezer is filled with hope because he has already seen the worst of urban deprivation and class oppression. He has committed himself to asserting a new sustainable lifestyle of spiritually motivated environmental justice.

He was instrumental in the founding of the Green Cross, an environmental variant on the theme of the Red Cross. He introduces religious institutions to the possibilities of energy conservation and renewable use of resources everywhere he travels, and he travels extensively, speaking and consulting. He urges churches to use their collective buying power to support farmers practicing sustainable agriculture. And he teaches them to remove deadly cleaning chemicals from their kitchens and closets, replacing them with biologically based alternatives. Above all, he ties all this activity into a radical statement of faith in the next generation’s right to live in a healthy world.

It is the same sort of radical vision of renewal that allows Bethel New Life’s dynamic leader, Mary Nelson, to plan for high-quality, energy-efficient low-income housing on the West Side, creating a radically new sense of place in the midst of a previously devastated neighborhood. It is the same radical vision of renewal that keeps Gloria Hunter’s garden growing in Baltimore. These people are shaking their fists in defiance at the death of imagination in their communities, and thus creating a new vibrance of place where they take their stand. The end of something may be near, but a new beginning is also at hand.

And therein lies a lesson for all those who have fled the city in search of greener pastures devoid of the urban problems that seem always to follow. If you flee the death of community, the death of place, you cannot defy it. If you cannot find the courage to defy it, it smells your cowardice and follows you. Many of our struggling older suburbs were once fine communities in their own right, replete with a sense of place that sustained a vision and a sense of belonging for their inhabitants. In the last generation, they have often been overwhelmed by newcomers who are simply fleeing the central city without a new vision of the community they want to build. Without that vision, we fight within our metropolitan region over resources that are no longer shared with any sense of justice.

The prophets of the Hebrew people made clear that justice and hope are inseparable. Hope springs from the imagination. In our collective civic imagination resides the life of the community. Through it, we build the sense of place and community that lets the human spirit soar.

Jim Schwab is a senior research associate for the American Planning Association and the author of Deeper Shades of Green (Sierra Club Books). He is working to build an interfaith coalition on environmental issues for the Chicago metropolitan area.

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