Opinion, Berkeley Blogs

This is Us. Urban density is our geopolitical destiny

By Vishaan Chakrabarti

A map of the US showing population sizes through large and small circles in red and blue

A map of the US showing population sizes through large and small circles in red and blue

The College of Environmental Design, proudly embedded within the University of California at Berkeley, is a global institution. With students, faculty, and staff from around the world, we watch domestic politics here in the United States through one eye, with the other focused more broadly on the larger world. But our parallax vision tells us that the two are inextricable. As a hegemonic international superpower, the U.S. and its elections have outsized impact for the planet in terms of global climate and culture. Like it or not, from Apple to Abu Ghraib, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.

In the aftermath of this particular election we have a chance to recover from the illnesses currently plaguing us. First and foremost in terms of this pandemic, we now have the possibility not only of effective testing and vaccine regimes, but of regimes we can actually trust. We have in our President and Vice President Elect, compassionate individuals who seem serious about addressing systemic racism, potentially centering on the first woman of color, Senator Kamala Harris, to ever reach such high office...and hopefully higher still.

Depending on the great state of Georgia and the even greater work of Stacey Abrams we may—depending on the outcome of two Senatorial run off elections there—see investments in public housing and social infrastructure the likes of which we have not seen since FDR and LBJ, a reversal of decades of failed neoliberal policy that has brought us to this precipice as a culture. Given that our college centers on shared values of sustainability, equity, and human agency, these potential Federal changes are extraordinarily important to our collective work.

So yes, our long national nightmare is over. For now.

As a person of color—like so many of you who feel any sense of otherness in this country in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation—I felt deeply the sucker punch of this election night. Yes Biden received the most votes of any U.S. presidential candidate, but Trump received the second most.

Near half of the electorate, over seventy million, said yes to more of a racist, misogynist President, either because they shared his views or because they were so hungry for unaffordable personal tax cuts and unfathomable environmental deregulation that they are willing to overlook his views. Others sat out the election believing, somehow, that all politicians are the same. The fact that millions of us could not rise to offer solidarity with millions of us who have for four long years felt fully unwelcome in this nation says volumes of what this culture had been well before Trump.

For many who have been fighting systemic racism and sexism for decades, the last four years came with less surprise despite the election of President Obama, yet for others, many progressives included, the Trump era remains a critical wake up call. Some will insist he was an anomaly, when others of us know he is the big, ugly underbelly that is ever present just under the surface of this nation.

Racism is not on the fringe in America. Sexual violence is not on the fringe in America. For Americans to admit this, like the British before them, this requires admitting that we are not always “the good guys,” we are not always the protagonist in the action movie, we are not always the hero in the poem, we are not always the champions in the song. To admit this is the actual love of country, the actual love of democracy, to which we must aspire.

In the days, weeks, and years ahead, we have much work to do. In our college, this work is particularly acute because geography is destiny, and our destiny is density. Red states and blue states? Fuggedaboutit! Elections in the United States are increasingly about our cities and the communities that enliven them. Make no mistake, without black and brown turnout in Philadelphia and Atlanta and Reno and Phoenix and Omaha and other diverse communities across this nation, Donald Trump would be remeasuring the drapes for his White Imperial Palace.

Those same black and brown communities have borne the brunt of this pandemic, of years of injustice, of centuries of disinvestment and disenfranchisement...it is they who stood in long lines to vote or whose ballots Trump is currently impugning. It is for those communities that we, in our work as architects, planners, and landscape architects have an obligation to listen, to learn, and to commit ourselves.

As this nation becomes more urban, we must understand that we are headed for a potential political calamity in the coming decades. By 2050, seventy percent of Americans will be represented by thirty senators, and vice versa. This is because most people will gravitate towards the employment centers and educational institutions in seven or eight mega-regions around the country, not only on the progressive gentrified coasts but in the Charlotte-Atlanta corridor, in the Texas Triangle, and other regions that transcend red, blue and purple.

Many of those trans-state regions will not have political representation in our anti-urban, Jeffersonian system of governance, which will no doubt result in significant political turmoil, a turmoil to which our disciplines are deeply relevant. Our work of creating sustainable communities of belonging is as pertinent to those regions—as well as the struggling rural communities too often left behind— as it is in the Bay Area, the Pacific Rim, or any other major city around the world. Strengthening all of our communities through public housing and social infrastructure can help abate the political storms before us, can help quell the coming civil unrest, can help forge a new American Dream for all.

As we seek this cultural sea change, we must be ever vigilant, because communities that desire belonging for all deeply threaten those who do not. The anger and grievance we see in half of our body politic is rooted in precisely this threat, because we have dared to challenge their closely held narrative that they and they alone are “the good guys”—this is what they dismiss as political correctness.

It is time for new narratives, it is time to rebuild this nation physically and spiritually, and that must begin with admitting who we are, including our deepest faults. All of us must confront that this American carnage, that this is us.

But before we endeavor to change our collective future, let’s take a collective breath. Let’s allow ourselves to honor the hard work that went into this victory. Let’s celebrate the poll workers and poll goers who made this happen. Let’s celebrate for the planet. Let’s celebrate the possibilities of a better us.