How we got here and the raison d'etre for the Urban Theater
Editor's note: It's the first post so it's kinda manifesto like. As we get to know everyone we'll keep reinforcing what we want to accomplish but will shift into a more casual, but always well-researched tone.
Act I: The Hollowing
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan dismantled federal support for cities.¹ They slashed funding for housing, transit, and urban development. Congress followed suit, gutting HUD and treating it as a political afterthought so irrelevant that in the Netflix series Designated Survivor, the HUD Secretary played by Kiefer Sutherland represents the last man standing in the presidential line of succession after the rest of the cabinet die in an attack. (In reality the HUD secretary is 13th)2
Successive administrations—Democratic and Republican—offered rhetorical support but failed to reverse the damage. They praised cities while starving them. They celebrated urban innovation while defunding the systems that made it possible.
Planning theorists and historians responded with documentation. They mapped the retrenchment, convened coalitions, and published frameworks. But they stopped short of confrontation, their solutions soft, language procedural, urgency muted.3
Act II: The Siege
Today, federal agencies actively target urban communities. ICE conducts raids with support from federal law enforcement from the FBI and DHS.4 The U.S. military and National Guard deploy to suppress protest and intimidate residents.
Congress and state legislatures withdraw funding from public schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. They censor urban universities and abandon their budgets. They punish “blue” states and threaten elected leaders in Democratic cities with prosecution and imprisonment.5
This is not passive neglect. This is active hostility.
Act III: The Response
Mass protest is not enough. Tactical urbanism must become the operating system of local governance. Cities and states hold immense power—but they’ve refused to use it.
It’s time to write a new script for our cities, for our Urban Theater. If you are:
- Chicago raise the bridges. Shut off access to the City. You’ve done it before.
- Portland You do you, but more so. Designate Macadam Avenue a “Festival Block.” Issue permits to Food Trucks to operate. Install Jersey barriers around a dozen portable toilets and handwashing stations. Have Public Works deploy street furniture for pedestrians. Reclaim the space and frustrate ICE’s ability to operate.
- All other City Leaders reclaim the sidewalk ballet Jane Jacobs envisioned and the everyday practice of life Michel de Certeau honored.6 7
This is the Urban Theater. And we’re here to help unite the strategic with the tactical. To operationalize the urban ideas we all know.
Call to Action
We call on planners, civic leaders, technologists, and movement architects:
Use your power. Shape the narrative. Deploy the infrastructure of resistance.
Subscribe. Collaborate. Act.
Let’s build the next act together.
Endnotes
1 As urban historian Richard Wade observed, “the administrations of Nixon and Ford “simply announced that ‘the urban crisis’ was over and then systematically dismantled or bureaucratically crippled” the urban initiatives of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Carl Abbott credits this to political leadership frustrated with the intractability of urban social and economic plight and the political class wanting to use money where they could more easily claim credit for successes (Urban America in the Modern Age, pp. 117–118).
2 See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5296406/
3 Solid and analytical not super tactical - see The Truly Disadvantaged William Julius Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 1987), and/or Urban Decline and the Future of American Cities Katharine Bradbury, Anthony Downs, Kenneth A. Small (Brookings, 1982)
4 https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=ICE+conducts+raids
6 Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1992.
7 Certeau, Michel de. Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 2013.
