I like to feel that I’m well-acquainted with my local surroundings, and I’ll often complain to myself about having exhausted my options of directions I could go to find new running routes. This is especially true when I’m in my hometown of Tyler, TX. But even there as in Houston, the city keeps proving me wrong. Neighborhoods can change (from the vantage point of me running through them) so quickly. They can be so close together yet so distinct, and when you grow up in one place, the places you go are so routinized and the routes to them so regular that you can be completely oblivious to what neighbors you but isn’t your neighbor.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was completely unfamiliar with the neighborhood where my group’s project site is located, even though it is less than 3 miles from my off-campus house. The site is the former location of CES Environmental Services, which used to clean and manage industrial chemical containers, recycled chemicals, and treated waste water (http://www.cesgriggsrd.com). This got me thinking about how the spatial boundaries of the “community” in “community organizing” become defined, contested, and leveraged.
I’ve also thought a lot about this in the context of the initiative to secure a Community Benefits Agreement from Rice Management Company as they develop a 16-acre innovation district around Sears/Fiesta/Wheeler Station just down Main Street from campus. When the development was first announced, it was branded as the “Midtown” Innovation District. (It has since shifted to “South Main” Innovation District.) As fellow students and I have organized to hold Rice accountable for the displacement and disruption that is likely to result, the Third Ward has become the center of the initiative. This is partly because the 16-acre site is simply very close to Third Ward proper. Midtown and Third Ward are neighboring neighborhoods. But if being a neighboring neighborhood was the criterion we were leveraging to claim a responsibility between Rice and a neighborhood, then we would be co-organizing with the East Montrose Civic Association as much as the Third Ward is Home Civic Club. (But we’re not.) But in fact, our claim of Rice’s imperative to be accountable to Third Ward is contingent not on symmetrical concentric circles of distance, but on Black histories, lived experiences, and speculative futures that re-connect the Sears/Fiesta/Wheeler site to Third Ward. (This undoes the work of Highway 288, which bifurcated Third Ward in the early 70s and paved the way for the Midtown/Third Ward distinction to be ever more reified).
With the Innovation District, the concentric ripples of relevance follow the asymmetrical pathways of things like affordable groceries from Fiesta to renters in Third Ward or the flow of capital speculation that we fear will accelerate in the form of predatory home-buying and town home development that has already spilled over across Emancipation Avenue. Going back to the CES site: in what directions to toxic ripples lead? How do the boundaries of their expansion comprise (or not) the “community”?
Dr. Wool, Gebby, and I recently attended a meeting concerning the CES site. When the legal aid representative presented a map marked with proposed sites to conduct off-site soil tests, many community members responded with “what about [this or that area],” and pointed out something that made that place relevant enough to the center of toxicity to warrant testing. Someone’s house was on the other side of the street from a proposed boundary, a school playground wasn’t marked, the wind and water would carry the toxicants this way and that… With the wind, air, and soil being the carriers of toxicity, there was a tension in how those vectors might reach beyond the OST “community,” but also how the standardized/legitimized methods of measuring where the toxicity extends leaves the boundary of relevance short of including people who definitely place themselves within the OST community.
We talk about community organizing as happening “around” an issue: a spatial analogy that does not usually translate to the real ways that people in whatever location they are become concerned with and connected to that issue.