Dr. Mindy Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, and author of “Root Shock.”

by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD

In 1970 Andrea Clark got a camera and started to take pictures of the East End neighborhood in which she visited her father and his family (see The Urban News, February 2009). One thousand of these photographs were recently given to the Pack Memorial, a treasure chest of images of an area that was destroyed to widen a road . 

Remembering the past

The historic East End neighborhood draped two hillsides adjacent to downtown, an area that was scooped out for the road and left barren. During a visit to Asheville from February 27 to March 3, I had the opportunity to walk around the area. Asheville downtown is precious, in the sense of “affectedly dainty or overly refined,” a definition offered by the Free Dictionary online .

There is a drug store and a phenomenal bookstore, but that is pretty much the end of its utility. The rest of the stores and restaurants are “destinations” for tourists and well-heeled area residents.

I could locate a point of connection between the East End and downtown in a faded Coca-Cola sign that Andrea Clark had photographed decades before. Now the sign seemed to hover over a precipice, descending into the barren hollow, which felt menacing because it was steep and empty.

What a contrast to the area as depicted by Clark! Then it was a dense neighborhood, crammed onto the hills, but with space for vegetables, stores, bikes, bands, and people. Black and white photos are rare in this era of color, but their starkness made the life more vivid. I was whisked into the corner store, and onto the sagging porches. The wise eyes of elders and shining eyes of children gazed frankly into mine. It was very urban, in the sense of civilized and unexpected.

Present And Future Challenges

Challenges to ecosystems are constant and come from many directions: I read in the newspaper about the infestation of wooly adelgids that are threatening the hemlocks around Asheville. As this is the dominant tree of the area, the whole ecosystem is threatened with change. All kinds of plants and animals will disappear, and others will move in. The austere look of hemlocks will disappear. Hillsides denuded of coverage will be more likely to erode and collapse. The implications are endless. 

I also read in the newspaper that issues of a new downtown plan were being debated – particularly the question of what heights new buildings might have – and so I visited the website, wondering what they planned to do about the cutoff of the East End. I found a map that outlined the area of interest, and but this did not reach out to repair the breach. I reacted to this as a physician, uncomfortable at physical mutilation that was not to be repaired. See the final plan (PDF).

Putting It Together

The historic East End, the wooly adelgid, and the Downtown Plan: these three chunks of information have been rattling around in my head since my visit at the end of February. How do we fit such pieces together?

In April, I hosted the US visit of Michel Cantal-Dupart, a renowned French urbanist, who is one of the planners working on the historic “Grand Pari,” the development of a plan for the greater Paris region. Grand Pari, which means “Big Bet,” is the world’s most important exercise in thinking about the future of cities. It has that stature because it was convened by the President of France; involves hundreds of mayors, architects, planners, engineers and others who care for the magnificent cities of France; will guide investment; and by changing the cities of France, will push development in cities all over the world.

Cantal-Dupart gave a lecture to my students at the Mailman School of Public Health. He suggested that we can use the three-ringed borromean knot to study problems of the city, the rings in this case standing for the historical, the real, and the imaginary. Where they meet, Cantal-Dupart says, is the trough of desire, what we wish for in the city.

In his system, Clark’s photographs of the East End are the history, the wooly adelgid is the current real challenge, and the Main Street plan is the imaginary vision for the future. Where they intersect is what we must name, in order to make the sustainable city of the future.
Cantal-Dupart demonstrated how this is done in a week of consulting in Orange, NJ, a small post-industrial city on the outskirts of Newark. Standing over a Colonial era tombstone dated 1745, Cantal-Dupart said, “The cities of the future have a history: they must lean on that history as they plan.”

He took us to the local park and pointed out that it was fenced on one side, but not the other. That was not an accident. Rather, the history of the fences was the history of segregation, manifested in a park that was open towards the white neighborhood, but closed towards the black neighborhood.

“Urbanists have the job of overcoming barriers,” he insisted to all of the assembled leaders of the city, “and we who are older have the responsibility to teach about the horrors of injustice.” He took us to the Orange train station, which was used by Thomas A. Edison, whose factory and home were nearby. “We must plan thinking far into the future, as Edison did.”