Fear, Violence
and Architecture in Jamaica:
the Archaeology
of a Collision
JACOB VOORTHUIS
We have allowed an essentially beautiful
little city to develop into a squalid, violent horror. Kingston is our
reflection and it is sick -are we going to let ourselves die in the mirror? Patrick Stanigar, 1996.(1)
Only look about you: blood is being spilt
in streams, and in the merriest way, asthough it were champagne.
Fyodor Dostoefsky, Notes
from Underground 1864
Introduction
Kingston is a
large urban collage situated on the south coast of Jamaica in the parish of St
Andrew.
The old city,
dating from 1692, forms a neat rectangular grid covering just one third of a
square mile located at the interface of a natural harbour and the Liguanea
plains which rise gently towards the Blue mountains to the north and north east
and the Red hills to the west. An organic and loosely radial sprawl has grown
outward from this tightly regimented block to engulf an area of more than 200
square miles and well over 1 million people. Kingston is currently one of the
ten most violent cities in the Americas. 1996 has the dubious honour of setting
a new record with regard to murders committed in the city, over 1000. These
murders sit upon a pyramid of threat, injury, robbery and the habit of rape.
(2) The year 2001 promisses to take that record a stept further.
For all the
frightening statistics, Jamaica is a country of people. The violence, even
though it is a serious problem, is confined to a number of core areas: Olympic
Gardens, Grants Pen, Southside, Trenchtown, Tivoli Gardens, Denim Town, August
Town and Mountainview. If one respects a few simple rules of thumb there is
little to fear. Despite the myths that have grown up around the name, Kingston
is not a city of monsters. Nor for that matter is it a unique city. It is the
product of forces which are global. For this reason we cannot dismiss Kingston
as an other place and derive comfort
from that distance. It is a mirror for all of us. The city of Kingston, largely
a product of Western mechanisms, presents a potent diagram of the social forces
that have shaped Jamaica out of the collision of three continents: America,
Europe and Africa. At the same time Jamaica is a country where social and
racial integration has perhaps been more successful than elsewhere. Where the
issues of race have at least been confronted. Most Western countries are having
to deal with the problems of social friction arising from economic and ethnic
tension. Jamaica has been dealing with such issues for a long time. As such
Kingston is an internationally relevant and urgent emblem of cultural
dislocation, friction and integration, involving the issues of race, gender,
economic and political division, to say nothing of an incisive environmental
neglect. The consequences of these causes of urban division are occasionally
violent.
This article can
offer no clear-cut solutions. I will confine myself to presenting an image of
the effects of violence as made visible in the architectural fabric of the
city. Having said that, I do propose a thesis. And that is this: At a barely
educated guess, and at the risk of trying to find an equivalence between apples
and oranges in the effort to compare them, I would like to argue that 95% of
the instruments of violence are deployed by the very people who would not see
themselves as violent. There is a tortuous philosophical complexity about the
issue of violence as it relates to architecture, which, although it drives us
to the edge of the absurd, we need to understand in order to deal with the
problems arising from a violent society. This is the question: How does the web
of causal relations work? How does the reality of violence relate to the urban
myths that it generates? How does genuine, and understandable fear complicate
the problem? And what can be included under the arbitrary label of violent?
It is these questions, which I hope to deal with in explaining and defending my
proposition.
We are living in
a time of increased social polarisation. Polarised societies harden the edges
of their internal divisions. The metabolism between divided and polarised areas
-at any scale of observation- is determined by mistrust and fear. The student
of architecture and the student of social mechanisms need to be aware of the
architectural consequences of social polarisation. I would like to argue that
architecture is a soft option to the issue of violence, which, in its response
with high walls and grills and the configuration of protective planning,
congeals the ruptures and divisions it establishes. That is a problem, because
at that moment the architectural response to violence starts becoming itself
part of the causal chain plunging a city into a vicious spiral of urban
degradation and blight.
Fear and mistrust
are the main generators of design in Jamaica. They cause houses, neighborhoods
and whole cities to cellularise and turn in upon themselves.
If the
predominant cause of this introversion and segregation is cultural and
ultimately political, the architectural effect is dramatic. To ignore the
issues, or to give into the obvious response to threat, will result in the
transformation of each place into a prison, each social, bureaucratic or
commercial ritual of exchange into an absurd and convoluted dance through
elaborate architectural systems of control and exclusion. When architecture
becomes merely a vehicle of security and introversion, we know we are at war.
How long before the cities of the West will themselves look like the cities of
their most violent former colonies?
VIOLENCE
The issue of
violence in Jamaican architecture plays a specific and tightly circumscribed
role. There are three basic factors to be considered. The first is the
violence, which lies at the very core of the foundation of Jamaica. That
violence is the consequence of the mechanisms of colonialism and slavery and
the geometric configuration that such mechanisms force on the landscape. The
Second factor describes how the more recent cult of violence, carrying the
weight of Jamaica’s past, affects the modulation of space and division in the
buildings of modern Kingston. The third describes how the resulting
architecture reciprocates and in turn does violence to society. To play on Le
Corbusier’s facile dictum “Architecture or Revolution”, architecture in Jamaica
has taken over where society has failed itself.
In this way I have identified a
largely self-referential and downward spiral of urban deterioration from which
it is impossible to break free without the fatigue of the icons and fears that
keeps a city responding to its own problems in a simple, reactive way. In this
process actual violence plays merely an iconic role, it is a principle of
authority that most people receive only through harrowing images of the media.
The cause of
violence in Jamaica is manifold. It has been well researched in documents such
as the World Bank report on Urban Violence and Poverty in Jamaica, a document I
have relied on extensively. (3) One cause they identify is the necessarily
narrow focus on survival as a consequence of economic conditions in the
country. That is important.
Another
cause, not unrelated to the former, is historical and metaphysical. It is the
result of a way of seeing that has
grown over time. I am referring to the consequences of racial and social
segregation, which makes people from different backgrounds appear as different
biological species. Racism and classism are the direct result of the habit of
objectification; of making man into a thing, the process of alchemy that
carefully selects individual examples and transforms them into hardened general
principles. Such objectification creates a desultory and rebellious machine. I
propose that the violence is partly the result of the simplification of a rigid
existential taxonomy in racially complex societies. Man in these societies has
become a victim of his own metaphysics, of his need to impose hardened
categories of being on to his surroundings. He has stratified himself into a
situation whereby he can all too easily be categorised as a racial,
socio-economic truth, allowing himself to be generalised upon and judged
without reference to his own humanity. This allows a cultural condition to
become part of an urban hysteria and sold as an inherent and genetically
programmed “essence”. Social strata’s
and racial identities appear too hardened in such an environment, too
self-evident, too impenetrable and yet they are merely the result of cultural
and aesthetic habit.
The project of modern society has
been to undermine the justification of these strata’s. The habit of racism is
receding intellectually: as a result the categories have become increasingly
unstable and arbitrary. Ironically this itself is a cause of crisis. Crisis is
a word, which describes a precarious moment of ambivalence and instability. The
city of Kingston is in such a state of crisis; it may mobilise its forces to
rebuild a city in love with itself. Alternatively it may consume itself
completely in a degenerate act of delirious self-destruction.
fEAR
The real
executive agent for architectural form ins such a situation is not the
violence, but the fear of it. Fear is a legitimate emotion, to which
architecture offers an immediate, compelling and permanent solution, which
avoids the need of addressing the social processes which create that fear.
The problem is that the proportional
relationship between the fear of violence and actual violence is incremental.
For every reported murder there is a disproportionate further entrenchment,
further polarisation, further introversion of communities and a further growth
of an increasingly insidious urban mythology. I would like to emphasize that
the blame for this does not lie with the media, their role is legitimate, they
must report. Nor can fear be adequately rationalised. There is a natural assumption that fear is the
consequence of a persistent reality: it is thought prudent to build
hermetically sealed vessels against this thing called violence. Fear affects
the city. Being a legitimate state of being, fear is, naturally, not subject to
the same social and institutional pressures as the violence itself.
Architecture not only reflects. By reason of its permanence, it helps to
enforce daily habits through the channels and obstacles -physical or
psychological- which architecture imposes upon movement and exchange. Those
habits are the shrines of social icons. The spiral identified above has become
binding through such intangible intersubjective factors as the mosaic
self-image, which the Jamaican has come to see as a homogenous identity. The
architecture of Kingston is an important ingredient in that self-image, both as
a symbol and as a habit. The question for architects and the superstructure
which they serve, becomes: How can we respond adequately to fear without taking
on the rituals and forms of hedgehogs, turtles and rabbits?
politics as an
architectural act: tHE dEVELOPMENT OF kINGSTON
The historical
development of Jamaica has, right from the start of British colonial rule, created the architectural and
proto-urban climate of the city of Kingston.[1]
The resulting architecture and the urban pattern now reciprocate the horrors of
that period by reinforcing the habit of that history, creating an impossible
circular labyrinth, a sick mirror.
Within the
mechanisms of colonialism and slavery lies one cause of violence. The
participants in colonialism allowed a social stratification to become possible
along such simplistic visual categories as skin-colour. This caused a taxonomic
violence of aggressive segregation that manifested itself in the systematic
coercion and control of which the architecture servicing the slave trade and
the plantation economy is a potent image. It is precisely the visual simplicity
of this system: white master and black slave that made the polarisation so
potent.
It is important to note, as Orlando
Patterson pointed out, that the slave cannot be defined as mere property. (4) The slave was first made into an object, a
machine, which was then owned. It is in that dehumanising objectification that
the banality of being an owned object became cruel. The cruelty manifested
itself in the re-configuration of priorities for such everyday concerns as
housing.
Housing, during
slavery was not about dwelling, it was about product storage. (5) Enslaved
people were categorised and stored according to their use and usefulness and
not according to their own systems of personal relationships. They were
consumer goods. But of course that metamorphosis into object was never
complete. It was the complex dialectic of the partial and humiliating success
and the partial failure of human objectification that defined the strange and
disproportionate environment, which a slave-based economy created. That is the
past Jamaica carries. The mechanisms with which the colonisers enforced their
colony and the largely passive, internal resilience, with which the enslaved
bore their enslavement, produced a setting and a set of social rituals from
which a divided and antithetical culture emerged.
Architecturally
the slave trade had a number of consequences. At the interface of the slave
trade, the harbour, the form of the buildings had to accommodate the exchange,
storage and movement of slaves. Being regarded as objects they needed only
undifferentiated containment. Undifferentiated, that is, in terms of human
concerns: family structure and kinship, tribal attachments etc. But there was
in fact a very stringent differentiation: the slaves were sorted as products
and stored accordingly. In the ship another functionalism determined the shape
of the space: the maximum cargo possible with the minimum amount of maintenance
to ensure the delivery of an adequately fresh product.
In laying out a
sugar estate, in which the slaves would be confined for most of their lives,
the principal objectives were a central location for the works and an overall
symmetry in the ordering of buildings and crops. The monoculture of the sugar
plantation describes a proto-industrial process. Maps and surveys of the
plantation allowed the planter to impose his ideal models of order upon the
landscape. Locating sugar works at the centre of a plantation, minimised cost
of transport for the cane to the mill. The desire to minimise the time wasted
in movement of labourers meant that the estate village tended to be near the
works. The location of the greathouse or overseer’s house close to the works
and the village had to do with the planter’s desire to maintain surveillance
over the coming and going of his slaves.
The concentration
of profit slavery made possible had two strange effects on architecture.
Firstly it provided the absentee- landowners back in England with the money to
fulfill their own architectural aspirations. Fonthill Abbey for William
Beckford, “England’s Wealthiest Son” is a well-known example. Connected with
that is the institutionalised reluctance to reinvest anything above the minimum
in the colony itself. In other words much of the money generated in Jamaica was
never ploughed back into the economy, never allowed to improve the land. A
situation that continues today, as most savings are invested outside of
Jamaica.
Another
consequence was the treatment of the slave him or herself. Architecturally
speaking the last aspect is largely negative. An owner did not have to be
careful with a slave. Slaves were easily available. Bad slave management was,
in a certain narrow sense almost a prerequisite to economic success. A high
turnover of slaves was a measure of control over them. For this reason
longevity for a slave was a very mixed blessing at best. He had nothing; he was
stored in long barracks or in small huts where it suited the master to limit
the dignity of the abode. Having to limit that dignity he had to keep it away
from his own view, his “lordship of the eye” ans well within the view of the
overseer. Was it then a surprise that after emancipation many “free” villages
in Jamaica hid themselves from the eyes of their former master?
The slave had
always to inhabit the periphery. In some cases this allowed the slave to regain
some of his humanity. But whenever the slave broke out of the plantation, in
what ever way, he was automatically relegated to the periphery by having to
settle in unwanted land. The political power of the plantocracy meant that it
controlled land tenure and settlement patterns as well as the internal
organisation of their private domains.[2]
When slave
society in Jamaica became unstable through protest and economical decline in
the early nineteenth century, the dissolution of the mechanisms of coercion and
control gave way to a period of social readjustment. That period is characterised
by a re-stratification of society into a new order. This new order was slightly
more complex than white master vs. black slave, partly because of the
introduction of new peoples from Asia and partly because of the formation of a
substantial black middle class. Nevertheless the old oppositions remained
powerful. The extraordinary distortion whereby all white men were visibly
wealthy, reinforced a simplified image of the world. Racial segregation
continued; the architecture, the language and the cultural institutions as well
as the urban pattern were its material signs. The socio-geographic enclaves
defining the neighbourhoods of Kingston speak clearly of this segregation. But
the most interesting urban events are naturally those where such an established
order was tested. Devon House is one such event.
Devon House was
built during the 1880’s by George Stiebel on millionaire’s corner on the outer periphery of late nineteenth
century Kingston along the main artery leading into Kingston proper. George
Stiebel, who had made his fortune digging for gold in Venezuela, was Jamaica’s
first mulatto millionaire. Devon House is a manifesto of his equivalence with the best. In building the Palladian
Mansion with its elegant concern for tropical comfort, George Stiebel did not
set up his own icons of social success but instead competed on the established
European norms of social display, significantly inverting some of them. He
travelled Europe with a retinue of white
servants. The act of encroachment was so brazen, so threatening to the less flexible parts of the
establishment, that the Governor Generals’ Wife, Lady Musgrave reputedly took
matters in her own hand. She had a road built on axis with the approach to
King’s House, the governor general’s residence further up the road, thereby creating
a link to an alternative approach to the city whereby she could avoid the
odious confrontation with this bumptious upstart of the wrong colour who was so
violently invading her social territory. The road, to emphasise the complexity
of historical development, is still called Lady Musgrave Road, and is very
pleasant.[2a]
kINGSTON eXPLODES
With economic
contraction in the nineteenth century and the crisis in the 1930’s came
increasing urban immigration, people looking for economic opportunity. With
racial segregation a cultural inevitability, people grouped according to a
gravity of the familiar and according to what they could afford. Often these
two gravitational forces overlapped in the colour of one’s skin. The growth of
Kingston consequently presents a fascinating sequence of settlement and
migration. The initial grid functioned on the one hand as a centripetal force
for economic opportunity and on the other as a centrifugal force of acquired
wealth, which cose to settle in ever widening concentric circles around the
urban core and bringing small pockets of the servicing poor with it. Land
settlement patterns followed no plan but the contingencies of a market driven
economy of supply and demand whereby the atrophy of the sugar trade caused
plantation owners to off-load their land. The West of Kingston was the obvious,
first and eternally-temporary resting place for the rural poor coming into the
city. At the end of the road into the centre lies the largest market for rural
produce in Kingston: Coronation Market. West Kingston today is one of the most
troubled areas.
There are three further events that
helped to determine the image of the city today. The first is the economic
emigration out of Jamaica starting during the economic depression of the thirties
and culminating in the fifties. This process severely ruptured the ties of much
family life creating a sizeable subculture of displaced and dislocated children
growing up in the looser affiliation of secondary family ties.
The second is the development of New
Kingston which started during the late 1960’s when a plan was launched to move
the financial hub of the old city a mile northward, closer to the residential
web of people it was meant to serve. These people consequently moved yet
further away again, into Beverly Hills, Jack’s Hill, Red Hills etc.
A third element
is the radical and racially motivated socialism introduced during the seventies
under Michael Manley. He attempted to reverse the growth of the underprivileged
class in Jamaica. Apart from instituting educational reforms and trying to
widen the economic base, his party rather oversimplified the problem by openly
declaring the people living in wealthy areas such as Beverly Hills to be “the
enemy of the common man”. In a famous speech Manley told the people who were
not happy with the impending new order that there were five planes a day to
Miami. The emigration from Jamaica, which had always had an economic motive was
now made more complex by the ingredient of political expediency and fear. Many
of the affluent middle class took Manley’s advice, especially as they felt
threatened by the increasingly open resentment vented by those who were set to
gain by this politics of change.
These three
factors quite literally caused Kingston to explode, leaving a huge crater in
the centre. The vacuum was quickly filled by rural immigrants still looking for
opportunity but finding it had moved on. With many of the wealthier middle
classes gone, so had money and the economic and managerial base for production.
The economy declined rapidly. Pockets of desperation dotted the old inner city.
Existing buildings, neglected by their owners, deteriorated, gashing the city
open. A few were inhabited by squatters, while other residential properties
were slowly transformed into hollow yards of unfathomable human density and
squalor. Land tenure in the Downtown areas of Kingston became uncertain and as
a consequence settlement of the land became subject uncontrollable mechanisms
as many of the landowners ceased to collect rent altogether, either because of
fear or because they were no longer in the country.
The radical
socialism adopted by what ironically was the former right wing of Jamaican
Politics, the PNP, widened the gulf inherent in any two-party system, especially
during election time. The economic slide induced by this process of radicalism,
made winning elections a matter of extreme urgency for both parties. As a
result of this urgency, the political agenda of each party became less well
defined in terms of policy. Their common priorities to secure the popular vote
gained an all -exclusive focus. A system of political patronage was set up
within the constituencies of both parties to ensure that the popular vote went
the right way. Extant divisions among groups, the culture of fierce loyalty and
existing criminal gangs were mobilised to the cause. Guns were imported and the
political parties became embodied in their slogans and party-colours. They
demanded a tribal and unquestioning loyalty rather than a full belief in the
political program. Good intentions were quickly hollowed out by expediency. As
such the electoral history of Jamaica has created a surreal urban patchwork of
antithetical areas in what should have been the heart of the city of Kingston.
hOUSING AND
VOTING: tHE GARRISON cOMMUNITY
The increasing
numbers of urban poor and the need to secure their vote made housing an area
both of genuine social concern and political potential. The Garrison community is the urban type
created by that process. The geometries of movement, settlement and social
friction were all redrawn according the political poles within a neighbourhood.
Low income housing schemes, sometimes given cynical nicknames like Angola, or
Pegasus, the pathos of which will be explained below, were populated through
covert systems of political patronage by people willing to declare their
loyalty to a particular party. It is important to note that this system was
part of the grass root level of politics where small doses of administrative
power were effective personal weapons within the war for scarce benefits and spoils perpetuated by political tribes. The
resulting political “simplification” of an area duly resulted in the
geographical polarisation of communities into garrisons, areas overtly defined
by their political allegiance.
Trenchtown, a
particularly potent example, is a desolate place, true to the omen in the name,
even though the area was harmlessly named after a Lady Trench. In this area,
the birthplace of BobMarley, the geometry of confrontation takes on a dramatic
simplicity. A broad no-man’s land circumscribes the entrenched communities.
Precariously situated on the edge of one of them is a lonely police station.
Before it was built bullets used to fly freely across the divide, especially
during the more frolicsome evenings. Aimed only vaguely in the right direction,
the kill was an arbitrary piece of luck; the victim’s identity not important.
It was enough that the victim be one of
them: PNP or JLP. To prevent the main road being used by opposing posses, a
roundabout was blocked by a house built over the road. The urban haemorrhage
was treated by the creation of an urban thrombosis.
The no-mans’ land
is still punctuated here and there by the ruins of past acts of futile
good-will and foreign aid. A cinema lies in ruins. Community centres are places
to plunder building materials. Health clinics disintegrate under the immense
and insupportable weight of the problem. The result is a desolation, which
achieves a brutal poetry echoed by the harsh words and provocative movements of
Dance Hall Culture. Further development is discouraged by the people who live
in these areas. They just want out. To them Trenchtown is a bad place; the thing they crave above all: jobs and respect, lie
beyond its boundaries. (6)
As a result they
have internalised their houses. The interiors scream of a desire for normality:
photographs of pretty babies plaster the walls, what-nots and shiny ornaments
make John Soane’s Museum look like an empty railway station. But outside,
young, empty men sit, nothing to do, on fences, smoking the weed and bearing their extraordinary typology of scars as marks
of respect and identification.
Many now realise
that the social housing schemes of the seventies and eighties merely concentrated
on alleviating the symptoms. High rise “Government Yards” called “South Africa
Flats” were built at minimal cost in the naive but understandable belief that
they were better than the self-build shanty towns they were meant to replace.
The one called Pegasus, mentioned earlier, was given that nick-name because it
lies on axis with a luxury Hotel of that name visible above the scarred
landscape in the fantastically distant north of New Kingston. I think that
contrast explains the problem. The popular opinion is that “Jamaicans don’t
like living in high rise apartments” Looking at a South Africa Flat or
government yard one can hardly be surprised! Surely it is not the high-rise as
a generic solution, which is meant here, but this specific kind of high-rise: a dire concrete shell designed to
alienate by the inadvertent evil of good intentions.
Social housing policies globally
have continually given in to the prevailing wisdom that ever lower costs, built
by people with ever fewer skills at ever minimal standards would solve a
problem for the moment: At least they have something was the
argument, it is better than nothing.
Research has borne out that that is not quite so. In fact these schemes created
their own problems. Short term cheapness has an awful long-term cost. The need
for unskilled labour prerequisite to this cheapness becomes the social
depository of a paradox. Social Housing needs cheap people to build cheap
houses for people with little money. In the process, the building industry has
created, or at least failed to discourage the formation of a class of people
without the means to their own dignity.
pATHS AND
POLITICS: corridor city
The political
climate is changing, becoming more pragmatic and economically opportunistic.
Election time is still an excuse for political cleansing, but the system of
political patronage is slowly being dismantled. Even so there is still an
exclusive focus on winning elections. The recent past is still a prime
determinant of the geometric description in zinc and concrete of the urban
rituals of Jamaica today. The landscape of Kingston remains divided into a
complex pattern of antithetical areas connected by an absurdly convoluted
network of paths. To each city dweller the city presents itself as a customised
patchwork of familiar fragments linked by corridors intersecting large blank
areas, usually lined with zinc and inhabited only by hearsay and its
mythological creatures. The boundaries of these patches in the politically more
sensitive areas are marked clearly by the colour and signs of that community’s
forcefully homogenised political affiliation. Countless deaths are still caused
by a Romeo persisting in his love for a Juliet and crossing the line that has
come to divide them.(7)
The area of Southside is infamous
for its complex partitioning into areas of a tribal loyalty for which the overt
justification is political affiliation. The place is a labyrinth of imperative
detours. People on their daily trek to the shops or to work are living proof
that the shortest efficient distance between two points is seldom a straight
line.
Paradoxically
this urban complexity obtains for both sides of the divide, the poorer areas of
Downtown and the wealthy areas of Uptown Kingston. Uptown and Downtown Kingston
are mirror images of each other. For instance, landowners from both areas have
capitalised on their land, creating yards (for the poor) or compounds (for the
wealthy). These mercenary subdivisions have created a patchwork of domestic
fortresses and an extraordinary network of non-connecting, narrow canyon-like
paths.
Those of the
poorer areas are lined by high corrugated iron fences, those of the wealthier
areas are lined by concrete. Cars take up nearly all the available space in the
resulting trench; drivers pay little or no heed to the army of commuting
pedestrians at the wrong side of the puddle: school children, helpers,
gardeners, farmers, beggars, churchgoers and nurses all negotiating the rough
edges left to them: pavements have no priority in the urban planning of
Kingston.
iNTERNALISING THE
HOUSE: tHE yARD AND THE cOMPOUND
That same mirror
image obtains for the home, which on both sides of the divide is being
internalised to a degree which is absurd when considering the climate. Houses,
built before the fear of violence became endemic, have attempted to reverse
their generous centrifugal geometry with grillwork and boundary walls. Verandas
and windows have been rendered lifeless by endless security bars and so-called
“rape gates”. Uptown Kingston has become a zoo for the benefit of the have-nots, or worse, a monument to a
Pyrrhic victory: their wealth obtained at the expense of its riches. Houses
built more recently have crept together into the angst-ridden compounds, facing
inwards and relying on tall walls and a huge and largely anonymous workforce of
guards who sleepily regulate access through a single barred entry. Don’t worry, my neighbour said to me
when I first arrived, everybody on the
compound owns a gun.
The poorer areas on the other hand,
where the endless supply of helpers
come from, have also become labyrinths of endless zinc fences. Boundaries to
eternally temporary structures, the fences are there to ensure at least a
modicum of privacy and to ward off the criminal and the outcast. Streets are
mere channels, life happens in hidden corners for the fearful and in the wider
streets for the fearless. In the stifling heat, single mothers sleep with their
windows closed. The air-conditioning system in uptown Jamaica, having begun as
a measure of social status, has now become part of the paraphernalia of
security: it allows the house to be sealed off. Uptown Jamaicans and
ex-patriates move around in air-conditioned cars and rarely venture into the
areas dominating their television screens at news time.
uRBAN mYTHOLOGIES
From this effort
at self-insulation an insidious and ultimately absurd pattern of expectations
and fears is created whereby people from each segregated area re-invent the
worlds of those other areas where they dare not venture themselves, or which
they see only through bars. This cultural insulation has a curious effect on
the image of the city. The city is filled with myths. Some urban patches, which
actually function very well for one group of Kingstonians, are labelled as
urban disaster areas for the other. One such example is St. William Grants
Park,
Designed in the
1980’s by the architect and previous dean of the Caribbean School of
architecture Patrick Stanigar. The park is always bustling with activity. It is
a marvellous place full of lovers and delight serviced by photographers having
to earn an income. But the park is invisible to the young of uptown Kingston
and, in their eyes, a failure. Were they to venture there the photographers
might be more lucky and the whole engine would start rolling again.
Architecture as a
political act: aRCHITECTURE AS AN hEROIC dEED
The most heroic
moments in the process of fragmentation and dialectical opposition described
above are also provided by buildings. Architecture in Kingston is often used as
a vehicle of ideological expression: each home becomes a contract of
allegiance, an icon of political, utopian or religious desire ranging from the
hedonistic to the anti-materialist. The bible, the writings of Marcus Garvey
and other texts are instruments of political alignment: quotations are painted
over entrances; wall-paintings and graffiti regulate the metabolism of people
going in and out. The urban poet Mr. Wesley until recently lived in a tree
between a shantytown and the ministry of Finance around Hero’s Circle. The tree
is a safe place. It was hung with long cardboard strips on which Mr. Wesley had
written his poetry, full of the pathos of racial division, of violence and
incomprehensible justification.
Similarly a food
stand at the side of the road will advertise its politics, its religion and, as
an after thought, its wares. One particularly favourite example did not survive
long enough for me to find an opportunity photograph it. It was a very modest
blue painted structure selling individual cigarettes and warm beer. On the
front was written in an evocative and economical patois: Me vex dem kill Malcolm X. Another hut has written on its door a
simple Don’t Mess with Me.
The political
nature of cultural expression in Jamaica is reflected in the fact that it is
the birthplace of a religion whose inspiration is political. Its messiah is an
Ethiopian king in military costume whose divinity is derived from the
miraculous act of maintaining his country’s age-old independence from European
domination. Rastafarianism has a powerful if anti-monumental architectural
language devoted to the issue of respect. Frequently built with cheap
materials, this architecture is an arte
povere; awkward in plan, utopian in its communality and strange in form it
has a visual and poetic strength, which renders its target speechless. These
informal manifestos, not confined to the Rastafarians of course, contrast
sharply with the institutionalised monuments to heroes and independence, most
of which suffer a cynical neglect. My friend the architectural Historian Thomas
van Leeuwen liked the concrete monstrosities of Heroe’s circle to a Mini-golf
park.
An informal
architecture has arisen which attempts to rehearse the unifying philosophy of
Bob Marley, an architecture of fearless independence. One example of this
architecture is a Rastafarian “museum”. Along one wall is a declaration of
independence, over the entrance is implied a solution to the whole problem of
Kingston, which finds wide support: Divide the land fairly and let people get
on with it. It is true that people who feel their land securely under their own
feet become visible proof of the creative energy in Jamaica. Portmore, for
instance, a dormitory suburb of Kingston, was intended as a low-cost housing
development of dreary starter units regimented into the pattern of maximum
returns. The minute people started settling there, these concrete and cheerless
boxes underwent a wonderful metamorphosis: the boxes became castles of an
extraordinary vitality.
It is a commonplace
that architecture reflects daily habits of people according to the channels and
obstacles by which it regulates movement and exchange. I would like to turn
that commonplace around and formulate a question to end with: What happens when
architecture becomes the only vehicle for physical security? When the fear of
violence has changed domestic habit and subsequently changed the architecture
enclosing that domesticity, how does the resulting architecture then begin to
affect society? Surely it will provide security at the expense of the very life
it tries to secure? I would like to end with an apocryphal but widely
circulated conversation reported between a prisoner and an Uptown visitor:
Prisoner: I am better off than you are.
Visitor: How so? Prisoner: I shall be out of my cage in just three
years.(8)
References
1. Stanigar,
(1996) p. 2. I would like to thank Prof. Ivor Smith, Alicia Taylor, Raoul
Snelder and David Harrison of the Caribbean School of Architecture for their
help and kind suggestions for improving the argument.
2. Levy, (1996)
p. vii.
3. Idem.
4. Patterson,
(1973)
5. Higman, (1988)
pp. 5 ff. & 243 ff.
6. Thanks to
Father MacDonald of Habitat for Humanity for an enlightening visit in 1996.
7. The anecdote
was reported to me by David Harrison.
Illustrations
1. Map of
Kingston (1977) Showing the initial grid and the subsequent sprawl. Trenchtown
is situated just to the west of the grid. Southside is just to the east. Grants
Pen Community is an enclave near “Four Roads”. Beverly Hills is situated on
Long Mountain to the north east of Kingston.
2. Distribution
of White Population in 1943, from Clark (1975) p. 181. Since then the pattern
has moved outwards although no new data has been made vailable.
2a I am grateful to a mail from Mr or Ms Jay Nembhard for pointing out the following: On reading your account of George Stiebel I'd like to interject on a couple of things. The so-called 'black' middle-class that 'appeared' after slavery is not entirely true. Unfortunately we live in an age where America's Jim Crow laws have been ignorantly mixed with that of British Colonial nations. What I mean is that America had a racist 'one drop' policy which meant that anyone who had any black roots, no matter how distant was considered black. Does that mean a blond haired, blue eyed man whose great, great, great grandmother is black? No!
The so-called 'black' middle-class of Jamaica in the 1800s were in fact 'mulattoes', that is, the mixed race offspring of white slave masters and overseers and black slave women. Unlike the USA, mixed race children were often looked after by their white fathers. They may not have inherited the father's estate but they were educated and as a result became successful businessmen and politicians. A good example is George William Gordon who became Mayor of Kingston.
George Stiebel was one of those mixed race businessmen who married a white woman. Yes, having white servants and marrying a white woman may have offended the ultra-conservative Lady Musgrave. But I feel the "establishment" wasn't as threatened considering that slavery was abolished nearly fifty years before and white influence had since decreased as sugar plantations were not like they used to be post-emancipation.
Being a seventh generation mulatto it does irk somewhat to be labelled 'black'. Not that I feel any more superior but I have a mixed heritage that is very much obvious and goes back nearly 200 years. I feel that somehow our history and culture is being side-swiped, not by hatred but by ignorance.
Regards
Jay nembhard
3. Density of
Population in 1970, from Census (1977) p.23 The patterns of density have since
grown but not changed position.
4. Concord Plaza
and the Inez Bogues Museum in Fort Henderson (Photograph Author)
5. A Door within
the zinc labyrinth of Grant’s Pen a shanty town enclave within Kingston,
Skettel and Mantell are names for undesirable people.
6. The zinc
Barricades of the Grants Pen Community. (Photograph André King)
7. A door to a
yard in Kingston, a manifesto of faith hiding a pleasant little garden.
(Photgraph Author)
8. The Francis Castle
at Newhaven, A Castle built by a family as an act of faith. (Photograph Author)
Reference
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