Book Review: The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping It There)

Abstract

book is certainly directed. Following what Dittmar describes as a kind of return to the city, he urges city builders to create the conditions that allow small-scale initiatives and urban community-building efforts to flourish. His call is perhaps especially salient following the arrival of COVID-19 in many cities where we have seen that do-it-yourself (DIY) communities and mutual aid networks have had to fill the gaps left by the state during a period of crisis. Many will recognize Dittmar from his work in transportation planning. Here, he shifts away from this focus, speaking instead to the contradictions and challenges of global cities where competitive imperatives have encouraged planners and policy makers to focus on catering to the lifestyles and desires of the affluent urban elite. Dittmar turns away from this kind of planning to focus on how urban resilience and sustainability might be achieved, suggesting that governance and planning must make room for and support more bottom-up, DIY efforts. Dittmar defines DIY as the “rallying cry” (p. 45) of his generation, rooted in the practices of those involved in punk communities and counterculture music and arts scenes. DIY, for Dittmar, has emerged out of cultures of craft and making, out of emergent, generative, and mutually supportive practices that work toward alternative futures—it involves an entire aesthetic and way of being and is often explicitly oppositional to the status quo. Here, he extends DIY to apply to a perhaps surprising series of broader urban community development efforts including cooperative housing development projects, community banking, housesharing and co-living practices, practices of self-building, food trucks, and pop-up shops. His explorations of these various forms are interlaced with personal anecdotes from experiences as the airport director at The People’s Republic of Santa Monica Airport, as an infrastructural project manager, and as a policy maker and planner. He outlines his personal approach to planning as a pushback against grand planning schemes inspired and shaped by the more “organic” and “artisanal” (p. 26) city-building approaches of Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs. Dittmar suggests that DIY is perhaps better characterized as Do-It-Yourselves, underlining the importance of collective work and collaboration and the dependence of people on others. As insightful as this is, his framing here perhaps misses or obscures some of the disinvestment and abandonment that has often necessitated DIY practices, it would be nice to hear him account for some of the government restructuring that has withdrawn social supports and the structural inequalities that have systemically marginalized and excluded specific groups of people, all of which force people to “do it themselves.” Instead, Dittmar focuses upon DIY’s rooting in something he calls “slack”—a kind of free space for experimentation, growth, play, and innovation that depends upon affordability and human capital to exist. “Slack,” for Dittmar, is a key ingredient to any creative scene and is often present in many disinvested parts of the city, but is simultaneously at risk of being extinguished by processes of gentrification which are often set in motion by the very presence of creative scenes. The tone here is sometimes boosterish—Dittmar himself was long invested in urban development strategies and was a strong supporter of spatial practices geared toward urban innovation, entrepreneurship, and experimentation. His sometimes uncritical optimism around these kinds of projects, and issues such as the flexibilization of labor or urban revitalization, might seem more than a bit idealistic to the many critics of creative city theory and its implementations. Critical urban theorists or planners will likely shake their heads when Dittmar goes so far as to suggest that the “discovery” and revitalization of urban neighborhoods, which he confusingly detaches from gentrification, is a sign of urban resilience. Dittmar explores a range of urban issues, from the fostering of DIY arts and music scenes, to the production of creative hubs, to postindustrial redevelopment projects, to challenges faced by DIY venues in cities around the world. He shares what he has learned in his experiences in varied roles, both as a member of music scenes and as a decision maker on the policy side. His insights provide us with possible directions forward in terms of protecting important grassroots spaces and scenes through proactive and doable policy measures. His chapter on at-risk DIY spaces and other important land uses that fall into a regulatory gray zone is one of the most practically useful parts of the book. While the material on revitalizing cities through fostering creativity is nothing new, his recommendations for how to preserve grassroots and underground spaces through government-supported programs and initiatives have yet to be taken up seriously or widely by urban planners and policy makers. This section of the work attests to the need for government itself to try ambitious new approaches to accommodate and support DIYers and speaks to the importance of investing in local assets and communities instead of attempting to competitively lure in creative elements from outside. The work overall is enthusiastic about the strengths of bottom-up and informal initiatives, and seeks to promote planning approaches that make space for them.