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On People’s Park, Democracy, and Politics

by Memory
Saturday, June 25, 2022, 5:46 PM

Berkeley city council-member Rigel Robinson released a recent article championing the UC’s proposed redevelopment project on People’s Park. This article was accompanied with a statement from council-member Lori Droste’s legislative assistant. The statement compared People’s Park activists to the January 6th insurrectionists.

PART 1:

(https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/06/23/opinion-how-berkeley-is-housing-the-people-of-peoples-park)

Berkeley council-member Rigel Robinson released an article centered around the need to redevelop People’s Park for support programs and housing. He praises the UC and city council (including himself) for this grand act of charity. However he doesn’t make a strong case as to why these services have to be built on People’s Park. The buildings of UC’s Anna Head complex (directly one block north from People’s Park) are falling apart. They are unsafe, and costly to maintain. Over the past 2 years, this complex has had 4 fires. Why couldn’t this site be razed, and replaced with the proposed new housing complexes? Why not tear down the UC’s Crossroads cafe, and replace it with a dorm? Why not introduce a new dorm in the core part of campus? Could the supportive housing project be built at the eastern edge of Ohlone Park, across the street from the North Berkeley senior center. This would place the building closer to BART, the library, city college and other civic services. (Ohlone Park is significantly larger than People’s Park. A building would fit there with less impact). These are just a few examples to show other other options exist.

This redevelopment project is politically tied to the conquering of People’s Park. It is not a case of the government acting purely for the sake of the greater social good. This development project is conditional to once-and-for-all stamping out a hub of social rebellion and social experimentation. The city could have built a new supportive housing and services hub on the former Telegraph Avenue location of C.I.L. (Center for Independent Living). It was a perfect opportunity the city passed on. Now the location is market-rate housing. The city didn’t care about supportive housing then, because it didn’t achieve the same political goal that building on People’s Park achieves.

The council-member refers to People’s Park as a “a gathering place for [the] unhoused”. Opponents of maintaining People’s Park as a 2.8 acre open space in South Berkeley, often will insinuate (or outright say) that the only people who use the park are homeless. This is factually untrue. Pre-pandemic, the majority of people who visited the park were not unhoused. The park was a refuge for houseless people, but most people who came to the park had places to stay at night. Most of these people came to the park for social reasons, to garden, to play chess, to use the basketball hoops (often students), to grab a free meal (Food Not Bombs), or to vibe (sativa, indica or hybrid). It is a fact that when the pandemic hit, the population shifted more towards the unhoused, as the park became a place where activists and service providers could coordinate mutual aid response for the unhoused. However, pre-pandemic the park was more economically and socially diverse.

Rigel calls People’s Park an “ungoverned space”. There is a truth to this, but the council-member fails to criticize the institutions who walked away from their responsibilities to manage park operations. Robinson seems to place the blame on activists and park preservationists. A decade ago, the UC disbanded the People’s Park Community Relations commission. There was a promise to reinstate the board, with new members and a new focus on community partnership; it was never reinstated. The UC’s main presence in the park is it’s police department, not it’s College of Natural Resources, nor the school of social welfare.

The UC Police had no real oversight, which resulted in systemically abusive behavior that drove a rift between park advocates and the university. Officers would humiliate people with mental-health disabilities. UC police would sporadically harass people handing out food. The department would actively intimidate people who dared to tend to the garden. More egregious behavior by UC police officers over the decades has included: excessive use of force, physical abuse, and at least one known case of an officer with substance-abuse issues shaking down people for drugs.

The city is also responsible for People’s Park being an “ungoverned space”. The city used to lease the park, and co-manage the park with the university. The city broke any commitment it had to People’s Park. There was at one point, many years ago, a plan for the UC to sell People’s Park to the city for one single dollar. However, the state government doesn’t permit any piece of university land to be sold for below market value. The state would not make an exception for People’s Park.

Rigel also wrote: “Changing anything at the park has been a political third rail… for decades”. The only changes that the UC attempted to make to the park did not include input from the People’s Park community. This lack of communication, and lack of community partnership lead to tensions. Most infamously, in 1991 the university had a plan to tear down the free-speech and concert stage, and replace a large swath of the open field with 2 sand-volleyball courts. This was not a concept developed though community discussions. When people protested the changes, UC police shot at people with wood slugs and rubber bullets — an action which only escalated tension. After being erected, the sand-volley ball courts weren’t even used, and the UC itself took them down. (Ironically, the UC would 20+ years later tear down another sand-volleyball court on the north side of campus. This court was popularly used by students and faculty.)

A little over a decade ago, the university once again proposed tearing down the People’s Park stage. A new stage was proposed, but the UC stipulated that the park community could not rebuild it. The old stage was built and donated by activists. The UC wanted the new stage to fully be university property. The new stage would also be more restricted in terms of use. As in 1991, the university made the mistake of not collaborating in a community partnership. The old stage remains.

Rigel says that park has been “frozen in time” since the park protests of 1969 and 1972. That is completely untrue. In 1974, an organic gardening course was created by university students. That same year, a project was started to plant California native species. In 1979 the first iteration of the stage was built, and a vegetable garden on the west end of the park was established. In 1984, the slide and swings were brought into the park. In 1989 the Catholic Workers brought in a trailer to serve as a cafe, which later was towed away by UC police. In 1991, Food Not Bombs began delivering food into the park. In subsequent years in the later 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s, planter boxes and garden beds have come and gone, various plants swapped in and out by various gardeners. More benches were created. There’s been concerts held by various organizations, including UC student groups.

Part II:

(https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/06/23/opinion-how-berkeley-is-housing-the-people-of-peoples-park#comment-5896527980)

Eric Panzer is the is the legislative assistant of Berkeley council member Lori Droste. He attached a statement to Robinson’s article. He asserts that advocacy for preserving the openness of People’s Park is anti-democratic. He makes an insulting, and ridiculous comparison between Park activists and the January 6th insurrectionists.

The UC is not a democratic institution. For decades, there has been a call to democratize the UC regents. In 1993, the Committee for a Responsible University proposed that half the UC regents should be chosen by California voters through electoral process. The Presidency of the UC is not democratic. When criticism was raised about former Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano (who had no experience in the field of higher education) being chosen as UC President, there was no direct democratic action available to stop her appointment. Likewise, the respective chancellors of the different UC campuses are not democratically elected.

Any comparison to People’s Park advocates and the January 6 insurrectionists is insulting and stupid. The Jan 6th insurrection was planned in part by the Proud Boys. While founded in the state of New York, the Proud Boys came to prominence during a series of rallies known as the Battles of Berkeley. During one of these rallies, the Proud Boys marched from Sproul Plaza down to People’s Park for the purposes of threatening people there. The advocates of People’s Park were in direct opposition to the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and the Alt-Right in general.

To follow Panzer’s argument, any protest against any government agency or institution, is tantamount to insurrection and advocacy for fascist dictatorship. Any past or future protest against the University of California, according to Panzer, is treason. The Memorial Oak Grove protest, the Occupy Cal encampment at Sproul Plaza, or any of the numerous building sit-ins that occurred in the 2010s were all acts of conservative fascism by Panzer’s definition. The only true progressive act is to not protest against authority.

The redevelopment of People’s Park is being challenged in court. In part, that is why the UC hasn’t sent in the riot police to shut down the park. Access to the courts is part of the democratic process, and a fundamental freedom. As for direct action on the ground, that too is part of democracy. People have the right to assembly, and the right to take a stand. The UC itself set rules on engaging protest encampments, after the police violence against Occupy Cal. It remains to be seen if the UC follows their own regulations, or if they shut down the park with a burst of extreme violence.

Lori Droste’s assistant wrote: “the Park’s supposed boosters foisted a policy of malignant neglect upon the Park”. This is a dishonest assessment. The neglect has come from the university, the city and the state government. Park advocates for years been the people trying to keep the park from falling apart. They have maintained the plants, and other aspects of the park infrastructure and amenities. They have demanded that the sick, the downtrodden and the destitute be given assistance by the government. It is the government that has ignored these pleas for years, only now to respond on the condition that People’s Park be redeveloped. This bargain is manipulative, dishonest, and uses the needy as pawns in a political game for the purpose of greatly disrupt activism in Berkeley and on campus.

Part III (Conclusion):

The debate is being presented as a false dichotomy. Either the redevelopment plan goes through, or the park’s current conditional state is maintained. In truth, there are other options. Housing and supportive services can be built elsewhere, and there can be a commitment to improving the park through community partnerships and mutual communication.

Another option is compromise, for those who are willing to explore such a path. Perhaps the supportive housing and a service center gets built on People’s Park, and the dorm gets built elsewhere. This puts a new building on site, but leaves more of the open space available for gardening and recreation.

Park advocates aren’t happy with houseless people needing to find refuge in the park. Park advocates aren’t happy with people with ailments going untreated. Yet, Robinson and Panzer are presenting a fallacy that advocates are fighting for this to be the status quo. They insinuate that people are advocating for the continued suffering of others. Their arguments are disgusting at their core, and don’t reflect the type of mutual aid and advocacy that activists in People’s Park have had to offer out of compassion and necessity.

( This article was originally published on IndyBay.org : https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2022/06/25/18850696.php )

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Gardening and Urban Planning

Gardening can function as a way to reprogram the mind and activity patterns away from the patterns imposed by exploitative architecture, transportation, and urban design paradigms. Food production is the basis of our life, yet the city’s design dysfunction is the denial of that basis, replacing it with capitalist enterprising based on selling transportation gear and construction projects, a “boxing in” of the human mind and imagination.

Some people have “Long Range Development Plans”. Do these people have real estate business interests? Construction industry interests? Academia business interests? Student loan business interests? Other interests? Undisclosed interests?

Long Range Development Plan – Thoughts, context, and questions:

Who’s development plan? On whose behalf? Corrupted by what special interests, industries, competing corporations, dystopian paradigms? More pathological air and noise pollution from predatory auto industry prowlers and ‘status symbol’ cruising, and everyone else trapped in automobile dependent urban transport and architecture paradigms? More space wasted on parking? More real estate robots and construction industry interests replicating vanity architecture disguised as necessity and authority? More destruction of green space by academic profiteering and rent exploitation? Is there ever any new green space reclaimed from the insane delusions of urban ‘human’ robots? How can money be seen as power when it seems to only be used to perpetuate and create more dystopia? The externalized costs of fossil fuel usage (climate breakdown, pollution, direct and indirect health damages and cleanup costs not paid for by the industry) are gravely damaging our present and future. People have become puppets of the designs of industrialists, constantly moving their metal boxes from parking space to parking space. The dependency is now becoming a terminal global ‘disease’. When will this pathological behavior and design be shutdown for the collective crime that it is? Who inside and outside of any entity, be it a university, a government, a neighborhood, a business, a church, or any kind of organization or group, is perpetuating this pathological design and activity?

People’s Park is at a point in time and part of a huge collection of other physical elements in an urban transformation. How will all the elements transform, and why?

Background context:

Internal Combustion book – Edwin Black
http://internalcombustionbook.com

Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth

Bonobo : Cirrus — This animation depicts the insane propagation of human industrialist construction and materialism across the landscape.

Books:

EcoCities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature book – Richard Register
Ecocity Builders
https://ecocitybuilders.org

How to Grow More Vegetables book – John Jeavons

Natural Capitalism book – Paul Hawkin, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins

People’s Park Still Blooming book – Terri Compost

Seed to Seed book – Suzanne Ashworth

Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual book – Bill Mollison

Natural Capitalism book excerpt:

2. Reinventing the Wheels: Hypercars and Neighborhoods – Natural Capitalism
http://www.natcap.org
The largest industry in the world, automotive transportation, is already well along the way to a Factor Four or greater breakthrough in resource productivity. It is also beginning to close its materials loops by adopting durable materials that can be continuously reused to make new cars, and to reduce dramatically its pressure on air, climate, and other key elements of natural capital by completely rethinking how to make a car move. This restructuring of so well established a segment of the economy is gaining its momentum not from regulatory mandates, taxes, or subsidies but rather from newly unleashed forces of advanced technology, customer demands, competition, and entrepreneurship.
Imagine a conversation taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. A group of powerful and farseeing businessmen announce that they want to create a giant new industry in the United States, one that will employ millions of people, sell a copy of its product every two seconds, and provide undreamed-of levels of personal mobility for those who use its products. However, this innovation will also have other consequences so that at the end of one hundred years, it will have done or be doing the following:
• paved an area equal to all the arable land in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, requiring maintenance costing more than $200 million per day;
• reshaped American communities and lives so as to restrict the mobility of most citizens who do not choose or are not able to own and operate the new product;
• maimed or injured 250 million people, and killed more Americans than have died in all wars in the country’s history;
• be combusting 8 million barrels of oil every day (450 gallons per person annually);
• made the United States increasingly dependent on foreign oil at a cost of $60 billion a year;
• relied for an increasing percentage of that oil on an unstable and largely hostile region armed partly by American oil payments, requiring the United States to make large military expenditures there and maintain continual war-readiness;
• be killing a million wild animals per week, from deer and elk to birds, frogs, and opossums, plus tens of thousands of domestic pets;
• be creating a din of noise and a cloud of pollution in all metropolitan areas, affecting sleep, concentration, and intelligence, making the air in some cities so unbreathable that children and the elderly cannot venture outside on certain days;
• caused spectacular increases in asthma, emphysema, heart disease, and bronchial infections;
• be emitting one-fourth of U.S. greenhouse gases so as to threaten global climatic stability and agriculture;
• and be creating 7 billion pounds of unrecycled scrap and waste every year.

Now imagine they succeeded.

This is the automobile industry—a sector of commerce so massive that in 1998, five of the seven largest U.S. industrial firms produced either cars or their fuel. If this industry can fundamentally change, every industry can. And change it will. This chapter describes how the world’s dominant business is transforming itself to become profoundly less harmful to the biosphere.
That transformation reflects, today partially and soon fully, the latest in a long string of automotive innovations. In 1991, a Rocky Mountain Institute design called the Hypercar synthesized many of the emerging automobile technologies. To maximize competition and adoption, the design was put in the public domain (making it unpatentable), hoping this would trigger the biggest shift in the world’s industrial structure since microchips. As revolutions go, it started quietly, with simple observations and heretical ideas.
The automobile industry of the late twentieth century is arguably the highest expression of the Iron Age. Complicated assemblages of some fifteen thousand parts, reliable across a vast range of conditions, and greatly improved in safety and cleanliness, cars now cost less per pound than a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. Yet the industry that makes them is overmature, and its central design concept is about to be overtaken. Its look-alike products fight for small niches in saturated core markets; they’re now bought on price via the Internet like file cabinets, and most dealers sell new cars at a loss. Until the mid-1990s, the industry had become essentially moribund in introducing innovation. As author James Womack has remarked, “You know you are in a stagnant industry when the big product innovation of the past decade is more cup holders.” Virtually all its gains in efficiency, cleanliness, and safety have been incremental and responded to regulations sought by social activists. Its design process has made cars ever heavier, more complex, and usually costlier. These are all unmistakable signs that automaking had become ripe for change. By the 1990s, revolutions in electronics, software, materials, manufacturing, computing, and other techniques had made it possible to design an automobile that would leapfrog far beyond ordinary cars’ limitations.
The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine’s heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights. Five percent of 20 per-cent is one percent—not a gratifying result from American cars that burn their own weight in gasoline every year.

peoplespark.org has a huge photo collection in various categories, gardens, music, art, style, history, and numerous event announcements and articles about the park and contemporary issues.

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20th Annual Bay Area Seed Swap
Friday, March 15, 2019, 7:00 pm — 9:00 pm
Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702

https://ecologycenter.org/events/20th-annual-bay-area-seed-swap/
Join us for the 20th Anniversary of the Annual Seed Exchange hosted by the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL). In its 20th year, this swap features speakers, a potluck dinner, and hundreds of seeds to share. Seeds from all around the Bay Area will be available to swap– take home a whole new garden! Come experience one of our most popular, fun, and knowledge- filled events! All are welcome.
Bring seeds and a potluck dish and get in free! Or a suggested donation of $5-$20. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Interested in volunteering at the swap, or helping us sort seeds on March 16? We would love to have your help! Email minna@ecologycenter.org.
Co-sponsored by Indigenous Permaculture Project, Richmond Grows, Sustainable Economies Law Center, and Transition Berkeley.

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People’s Park gardens photo collection – Greg Jalbert — To be added to peoplespark.org site.