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A fence is not only a fence. A highway is not simply a highway. The Chasm is Real.
At the University of Orange we say that the city is our University. The history of us cities you can learn in Orange, NJ That means that there are opportunities to learn everywhere we look - and everyday places and events can help us uncover clues about the health of the city. For instance, in Orange we’ve heard many times and from many people that it can be hard to connect, hard to find local resources, hard to reach out, hard to get people together. Why in a city of only 2.2 square miles does it feel so hard to bridge the gap? For us, seeing “fracture” like this is an important clue, and healing fracture is important work for every community.
If there’s a problem in neighborhood there’s a problem in the city. We first heard this at a 1993 Paris conference on AIDS, substance abuse, and homelessness. French architect and urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart delivered the opening address. Using the metaphor of the body, he pointed out that illness in one part of the body had to be treated with the whole body in mind. We can’t solve the problems in our neighborhoods without understanding them in the context of the whole city. We call this practice city in mind. “What is the problem we must solve?” Cantal also told us. “The fracture between the wealthy neighborhoods and the poor ones.”
We also have to take a few steps back and take an even longer view of the fracture we see in not only our city, but all US cities. In the course of our fieldwork, we learned that urban fracture has been caused by a series of policies that have “sorted” American cities by race and class. We were able to trace the effects of segregation, redlining, urban renewal, deindustrialization, mass incarceration, HOPE VI, the foreclosure crisis, and gentrification. This legacy of displacement is called “Serial Forced Displacement.”
Here you can watch a short film we created, explaining Serial Forced Displacement.