Urban Planning Professor has Unique Insights into Climate Issues

Dr. Arijit Sen is an urban planning and history professor at the University of  Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work in urban history, immigration, and diaspora studies has integrated itself into his public humanities projects the Newark-based Humanities Action Lab to contribute to the “Climate of Inequality”, a traveling exhibit on environmental justice. 

Dr. Sen highlights the importance of community-based learning due to how environmental justice is intertwined with cultural spaces. He further discusses how organizations should listen to frontline communities in addressing environmental injustices and how the media fails to acknowledge marginalized communities who suffer from environmental racism. He spoke with JAMS 660 Environment and the Media student Katherine Nguyen.

Katherine Nguyen: 

How has your work in different areas of the country affected your knowledge in urban planning to conserve sustainable practices in landscape development?   

Dr. Arijit Sen:  

There’s a linguistic diversity that’s classed as diversity, caste, diversity, religious diversity.  If you live in one place, your notion of place is so centered, that you do not even think that place is actually socially constructed. Belonging is socially constructed, and nothing really is fixed in this world. So that is the one thing that guides my sense of research and understanding of architecture and urban design because I moved from place to place, I realized that I, as a human subject, I’m moving to a place where I must address the issues of place, I’ll give you a very simple idea.

In India, it’s a very crowded country. So, if you want to take a bus, people might make a line. And then when the bus comes, lines disappear, everyone is trying to get inside the bus Gurbani come in, I remember the first incident of me this time, it was one mistake, I went into Iowa State, you know, very empty place, I didn’t see the line andI went in front because it didn’t strike me, the guy told me in this country, we stand in lines, that very interesting language. But then I realized that in this country, you stand in line, you wait for the green signal, before you cross, pedestrians cross the street, are all things that make me an American, I have to deal with that.  So, this whole idea of the dialectic that you make place, but then place makes you is at the core of what I how I look at space and urban planning.  

Q: How has race, class, and gender been an issue in urban planning in Milwaukee when it comes to environmental problems? 

A: In those cases, I began to realize, you realize that most of the time, South Asian and Asian immigrants barely build spaces for themselves, you occupy someone else’s prebuilt space. Unlike, say, the German buildings or Polish cathedrals, there’s very little to show, especially in the Midwest, of any Asian stuff other than temples. A few temples would be a few religious spaces but houses, it doesn’t look like it’s from theirs. What happens is you perform your way through you, you transform the house. 

So, I’ll give you an example of how that comes through in the way I do my research. So I’ve been working on Milwaukee’s vernacular architecture for a while and when actually architecture becomes important, not special architecture, because that’s where everyday people live. There are these duplexes in Milwaukee, that were built by mostly working class Germans, and the upstairs was supposed to be rented out. Then I started looking in there and in the communities.

Some of these houses became $1 houses, and the Hmong came in. They would buy them, but they do something curious. They would switch around the house, so they front than ever use the front. In fact, in a lot of these houses, they will put a shoe rack on the door, which is kind of weird, but they will, and they will enter through the kitchen. That flip was how, Hmong immigrants, knowingly or unknowingly, were taking what the physical space was and transforming it through everyday behavior. That’s how they made space. 

That got me to this contemporary work on environmental justice, the notion of resistance. If you really think of Black and Brown people in Milwaukee, you would think that they have no agency because there was racism. There was redlining, everyone was pushed in one place, then you build a big giant freeway. The houses were gone, bad school backgrounds, and but the thing is, those are structural forms of injustice. It’s been happening over a long period of time but people resist in different ways. They resist through embodied practices, how they do things daily, how they go under the radar and get things done. 

Q: How has your project, “Climate of Inequality”, influenced your outlook on environmental injustice?   

A: So that’s how I started doing this with Humanities Action Lab, most of the people were doing climate justice, but then they were doing climate justice in like some major moment and like a transformative moment, like a hurricane, mudslide, or floods. I didn’t realize the obvious thing outside of big giant climate disasters, the disaster is racism and segregation, which created these pockets of spaces.

Within the African American community, people will couch surf, they were going from neighbors and friends’ couches, that’s why they’re not out there in the open. There are unsheltered people, they’re not houseless, but they’re unsheltered, nevertheless. So those little things, our resistance to environmental justice. So, our project, my work has completely been around resistance rather than victimhood, or the stories of disaster because we all know what it is, we know that disaster has been written up. That’s where that’s how I approach climate of inequality. Climate of inequality, it’s about inequality, but it’s the story about frontline communities fighting  in ways that are very different from what we think it should be.

Q: How have cultural spaces and minority communities been isolated or connected with environmentalism? Are these communities affected by misinformation about the environment? What does environmental education look like? 

A: There’s a lot of people trying really hard to address issues of environment and climate in marginalized communities. For instance, in the city of Milwaukee itself,has a sustainability office and are really working with places like Sherman Park, to kind of turn into eco-neighborhoods, which basically means funneling in all the knowledge, expertise and human power into neighborhoods to figuring out how environmentalism can impact on the ground grassroots every day.  There are institutions like the Water Council, Walnut Vacant Conservancy, Adams Park, Alice’s Garden, different forms of environmental actions, they’re coming together. They’re involving young people in this complete understanding of this kind of systematic relationship to environment, food, and disease.

People in the frontline communities also have a deep embodied and ancestral knowledge about how to deal with the environment. The Hmong community, the first generation, remember hanging out with their grandmas and hearing about traditional medicine and all kinds of stuff. 

But it’s also history centric, there’s a guy called Eric Klinenberg and he did research on [urban] heat. In Chicago, sometime in the early 21^st century, there was a big heatwave and a lot of people died. He went and sort of tried to look at the different neighborhoods and how they died. He found that in one neighborhood, which is kind of middle class, a lot of people died but the next-door neighborhood was Latino and poor: very few elders died. He realized what it was: the social infrastructure relationship between people. The elders had their children and there was a close-knit community. Whereas in an isolated suburban community, you don’t know anyone. I realized that in order to, again, resist climate justice and environmental justice, in addition to all the scientific stuff, what we need is to have relationships with people. So, they’re looking out for each other.

Q: Do you think that these communities, what they see on the news and social media could be spreading misinformation about the climate? Do you think that it’s affecting them deeply in their communities? If there’s any new knowledge gained, how does that translate into their point of view about climate change? 

A: Yes, so the media knowledge about climate change doesn’t necessarily impact people in Milwaukee like it does in other places, like in California or Florida. In Milwaukee, it’s not.

If you think about the media, climate change only is mentioned when there’s a catastrophe. Even when engineers and scientists come in and talk about climate change, think about media conversations about climate change happening when there is a tornado, when there is a flood, when something happens in Florida, these disaster related issues. They don’t directly connect to the lives of people in Milwaukee’s north side, unless racism is also considered a disaster. Poverty is also considered a diverting disaster and it’s linked to the climate. I also have  problems connecting these things and  had to really get taught by people in the neighborhood. For instance, water is an environmental issue and  I mean by the lake and the river,  Sherman Park is so far away from water. The fact that these poor kids in Sherman Park, who live in Milwaukee and have not seen the lake, their lack of access to good water is in itself a disaster, it’s a complicated argument. You don’t hear that in the media. The second thing that you don’t hear in the media is arson, house burning, and crime. All that kind of stuff in poor neighborhoods that normalizes the fact that house fires and crime is happening. crime is happening because of poverty and lack of social support. Housing is happening because a lot of times homeless people go into how unsheltered people go into an empty boarded up building, and then there’s no heat, right? So they put in a little fire and go off to sleep, that’s a huge cause.

This guy called Rob Nixon, he calls environmentalism of the poor as slow violence; a slow idea such that unlike disasters, it happens slowly over time, it gets normalized. You expect a poor place to have some empty boarded up houses, some burnt buildings, some empty lots, all that is expected. Potholes, bad roads, garbage, crime, but none of them are natural. They all produced and that form of injustice, which is that there is an environmental injustice is not considered one justice. It’s exactly what I had to fight with for a long time to understand slow violence and that’s a huge thing. That’s how poverty and poor people, people of color, minorities, people are made to look normally like that’s what they do.

That’s why you have presidential candidates like Donald Trump saying immigrants pillage and  take up jobs. People believe it because this is the kind of slow way of thinking that is developed and  pretty violent. I think the media has a huge part to play in because I remember when you remember there was that Sherman Park uprising that happened in 2016, the murder of Sylville Smith. They were more concerned about the destruction: the firing of gas stations, destruction of property, and police cars caused by teenagers. We need to discipline people on the stuff that they hear. I think there’s a narrative loop, which shifts the focus away from the kind of climate disaster that you have in Milwaukee, and turns that into deviancy, poverty, and crime. 

Q: How has the urban segregation of Milwaukee affected environmental issues like sustainability, environmental health, and food issues? 

Yeah, the segregation produced in the North side and South Side in the north side, what happened is systemic removal of funds and resources. Their health issues are very bad diabetes, heart issues, all that has huge implications. COVID-19 happened, the black community was very strongly hit by COVID-19. They have some food places, it’s not a food desert but it doesn’t follow the FDA. Imagine an old person because these are also older neighborhoods, elders, large numbers of elders, you know, you can have three bags of potato bags, like heavy bags and walk a mile, the old people don’t drive unnecessarily. Food becomes a huge problem, even though  it’s not a food desert. That’s a result of  corner stores, which is kind of very ironic. As an Asian myself, I find this extremely problematic that most of  the corner stores are owned by South Asians and Middle Easterns. These are called middleman minorities, because these guys go where people won’t go but they’re not really connected to the neighborhood. They therefore profit and they know their lives are at risk. They just want to do business and hat happens as a result is the people see them as very unresponsive, and they start blaming them for structural inequalities, which they too are part of. So you have these grocery stores, Mom and Pop corner stores, we find cigarettes, alcohol, chips, and then sometimes even expired milk. Yes, at an individual level it is the fault of the store but at a systemic level, why aren’t there Pick ‘n Saves in these neighborhoods? Why isn’t there enough capital for local people to have stores? This creates the food injustice that becomes a part of health injustice and mental health.

In the black community, there’s a lot of respect for elders, just like there is in the Latino community and the Hmong community. This is the power of care, care principles, which is a feminist ethic, it’s not really something that you read in, like a traditional book.

I think this kind of connectedness of an environmental problem and a health problem in these neighborhoods, have to be resolved in a very connected manner. The neighborhoods have different programs, people get together to have fun, listen to music, dance, and do some gardening. It’s been pretty successful but we never hear that story in the media. There’s other factors that affected them with environmentalism like not having access to land, public space and resources.

Q: Has economic privilege been a big factor in why environmental implementation has been slowly emerging in less financially free communities? 

A:  Yeah, that’s such a good question. I shouldn’t lecture, you know exactly what the reason is.

So when we started the buildings landscapes cultures project, which is what is going on in the mid part of the climates of inequality exhibition, set in 2012. We were thinking we were interested in social justice first, stories about social justice, race, gender, class: we talk about caring. That’s when we realize caring is a form of social justice. We wanted to look at North Avenue, that original research project taking communities on North Avenue, North avenues considered an urban design, a cross section to the city. One side is the lake, then you have the little river in the middle, and then you have but then you have rich, privileged and white, and then mixed Riverwest. Then you have real poor, African American and Asian, and then you have Wauwatosa.

I think most of you are in school, for instance, in architecture school, that when I was teaching there, sustainability is a very entitled position. You have green roofs, sustainable materials, and solar power stuff. Housing is a problem, getting access to just housing where there’s no rodents. So you’re so correct. And that’s why I think in the media, we only hear highly Western, Greenpeace, environmental issues, which is fine. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be there, I think they need to recognize the fact that the entire world, especially the marginalized world, has been stewards of the environment right from the very beginning. Violence on one hand, places like China and India are major polluters now because they all want to be Western. They all want to have a car. But at the same time, if you go there, there are also depths of poverty within which you see recycling. All methods of doing things, making food. So can we bring these two together and expand the definition of environmentalism and environmental justice to take into account frontline communities’ responses to all this. So you’re so correct, you hit the nail on its head.

Q: How does or has environmental work affected cultural and heritage preservation? How are communities with rich culture and heritage being affected by this work?

A:  So let’s start with historic preservation. There’s an argument that the National Council for Historic National Trust for Historic Preservation makes when you build a house, or any building, there’s a lot of energy that is stored in there. So they’re all invested in the house, when you tear down all buildings, so you very nearly just make buildings for one use.

So you have these empty buildings sitting around, you have historic houses, but who wants to buy it, nobody has used it for money. They say that they call these cities, Legacy cities. If you drive online and look for legacy cities, there’s a whole discussion on that. They’re saying that the legacy itself, the historic character of the city, is a resource. And if you can use these houses, it’s called adaptive reuse of these houses and buildings, and you turn them into different uses. If you can do that, if you can make them energy efficient, then you’re actually killing doing two things. On the one hand, you’re not destroying stuff, you’re using the history or the memory of people, and then you’re using it for different reasons. So if you go on the walk, you’ll see a lot of these old buildings and wrinkled, old factory buildings and churches converted into lofts and living arrangements.

Imagine if we had a way to take a lot of these old buildings and turn them into affordable housing, turn them into schools, which are better. So those are things which need I think a little bit of top down governmental and policy push because no one does altruism by themselves.

There’s a place called Sherman Phoenix and it was burnt down. During the uprising, transformed the bank into a Food hall. So they’re trying to do this. You can do things like take a large building and turn it into kitchens like test kitchens so people who don’t have money would use the kitchen to generate food and have a food business. The Third Street corridor in Milwaukee is a good example of a legacy city. It’s basically large buildings, which used to be factories so a legacy, which could have actually made cities better, environmentally, just sit there, or they get torn down, or something.

Q:  Has environmentalism been a rising topic in your architecture lectures? Is it a factor that students are aware of in their field of study? 

A: Not always. I mean, I tried to bring it up in my lectures, you know, the thing about UWM is, if you look at all the classes they offer, they’re very generic classes. So they let me be. And I started this five week summer program. And it was to collect, just simply collect stories of stewardship. What are the problems? And how do you deal with it? What’s your history, we did that. I was doing that for many, many years, then it spilled out into my small classes. So the fall class is usually about when I was in architecture, it was about doing some work in the neighborhood based on the stories. In spring, we started having a seminar class, which was on environmental justice, but we will make posters and exhibitions, and we take it back again to the neighborhood. So what happened is that over 12 years, I kept doing this in the same neighborhood over and over again. And then all kinds of weird magic started happening, which was not controlled by me. That is, when you engage a neighborhood and a group of people over a period of time you get to build trust, but you also convince them that they’re valuable. So it took me 12 years to come to this moment of trust, when our education and teaching will be actually directly relevant to the people.

Q: What has been the most rewarding aspect of your role as an educator and your understanding in environmental work? 

A: So you might not be expecting this, but the most satisfying aspect of this is very personal. I grew up in South Asia, I was the single son of Asian parents, and you know what they are like, they never say, ‘you’re good’. They always say, ‘you could be better’. So I grew up with a sense of inadequacy, I’m not good enough. The reason why I went to these communities is because I said, I don’t want to be judged anymore. I’m done with it. I just want to hang out with people who just like, hang out and talk to each other, like the uncles and aunts in my past. My success came when I gave up trying to reach those ambitions that the system set up for me. It’s hard for me to say that to anybody, because I can’t tell people, “oh, you just have to relax, and then success will come”. That doesn’t happen. You trust in your intentions, and you do things, something happens.