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Place, emotion, and environmental justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller's 1965 "architextual" collaboration.

Article Excerpt
... you assume the buildings and



the small print roadways and the cornered accidents of roof and oozing tar and ordinary concrete zigzag. Well. It is not beautiful. It never was. These are the shaven private parts the city show of what somebody means when he don't even bother just to say "I don't give a goddam" (and) "I hate you." --Excerpt from the draft of the poem "Sweetwater Poem Number One" (1)

This essay examines the nexus between environmental and social justice as an intervention into the materiality of urban planning in a collaboration between two leading public intellectuals: June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller. Both interdisciplinary thinkers and civic environmentalists, they illustrate the concept that "environmental quality and economic and social health are mutually constitutive." (2) I shall situate their project "Skyrise for Harlem," an architectural redesign of Harlem that challenged many of the dominant practices of urban planning in the 1960s, within the paradigm of urban environmental justice, as theorized by Robert Bullard, Dorceta E. Taylor, Lawrence Buell, Joni Adamson, and others. Environment justice activists claim that where we live, work, play, and pray constitutes our environment, and that poor communities and communities of color have been burdened with disproportionate toxic exposures, as well as neglect and discrimination. Environmental justice became "one of the largest and most active social movements in the U.S. ... addressing the concerns of urbanites and people of color that had been overlooked by mainstream environmental organizations." (3) As Dorceta E. Taylor explains, the movement is made up of thousands of grassroots environmental groups nationwide; prior to the emergence of the environmental justice movement, mainstream environmental organizations were mostly white and middle class. (4) I shall claim "Skyrise for Harlem" as an interrogation of design and affect as a significant intervention into critical environmental justice studies. I've coined the term architextural to emphasize architecture as text and text as thickly descriptive, multidimensional (a precomputer version of hypertext), serving as a scaffold on which to build a vision of hope and embodied environments. Jordan originally conceptualized this project as a "threshold" or gateway into new possibilities for Harlem--where she felt there had been "no threshold. In Harlem what does entrance mean? On one side of the door there is the street of no human direction. On the other side is a hallway leading to a life closet of inconsequence... the inconsequence of being born only to continue dying." (5)

June Jordan was a poet, essayist, orator, educator, Black English advocate, and social justice activist who died of breast cancer in 2002. She transformed the bounds of self and society with a revolutionary vision and is an unacknowledged poet-philosopher of the urban environmental justice movement. She textually and visually mapped the dimensions of psyche and race, political economy, language and place. Early in her career, Jordan studied architecture and design with Herbert Gans, a leading sociologist of urban planning at the time (at Barnard College in New York City), as a Fellow in Environmental Design at the American Academy in Rome, and as a researcher and writer on housing and economic conditions on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for Mobilization for Youth. (6) She advocated a transformative urban planning that has never been thoroughly acknowledged or explored as part of her legacy as a poet and thinker; she collaborated in 1964-65 with Fuller, an engineer, architect, mathematician, and poet, best known for his geodesic dome designs and for what he called "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science": an attempt to solve humanity's major problems through the use of technology, thus supporting more people with fewer resources. (7) Their redesign of Harlem featured elevated, conical towers supported by central masts with one hundred levels (see figure 1) built over existing housing units containing new dwelling space, parking ramps, and suspension bridges cutting through the towers and creating a connecting road. The plan also included an expansion of green space, more leisure areas, and new thoroughfares. It aimed to keep residents and community intact and to take into account the psychological state of living in an area deemed a ghetto. This architexture challenged typical urban planning schemes of the time and the practice and rhetoric of "slum clearance." In an April 1965 Esquire article, Jordan first described Harlem as "life dying inside a closet, an excrescence beginning where a green park ends .... [I]t is of course a political embarrassment for which no political solution is adequate." (8) She claimed that "Skyrise for Harlem" is the way to "rescue" a quarter of a million lives by completely transforming the environment; she went on to describe the history of Harlem's disenfranchisement, the lack of a master plan for Harlem, and the effects of the recent riots on the psyche of residents. Then, she laid out the full plan of the "radical landscapes" she and Fuller proposed.

What is especially vexing is that Jordan's role in the Harlem-redesign project was minimized or omitted at the time the plan was publicly unveiled in Esquire (where Jordan wrote the article under her married name, Meyer, but was not credited in the piece as co-creator). She is also absent from articles that refer to the project, such as one titled "Cone Sweet Home" (18 April 1965) in Fuller's local newspaper, the Carbondale Illinoisian (where he was a professor at Southern Illinois University) and even at the Whitney Museum's recent exhibit (New York City, 26 June to...

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