Alamo
City’s different futures
‘Fast Forward’
left important points muddled.
By Harvey Graff
They include the installation of a new mayor, Ed Garza, whose status as San Antonio's second Hispanic chief civic official is often remarked — if not always in particularly relevant ways; the conversion and replacement of major military installations; the city's progressive, new zoning system or Unified Development Code, much touted in the abstract but too new to be tested.
The five-week series of reports and articles by Neil Peirce and Curtis Johnson, published in the San Antonio Express-News in March and April under the overheated rubric "Fast Forward: San Antonio's Future," touched on several of these issues. The series appeared during both the mayor's race and the push for City Council passage of the UDC.
My own responses to these developments, I need to state, are influenced by my status as a relative newcomer to San Antonio (I moved in 1998, after living for years in Dallas — a certain kind of reference point! — as well as Toronto, Chicago and Pittsburgh).
No less are they shaped by my love of cities and by my experience professionally as a student and teacher of the histories of urban places.
It is from that perspective that I was shocked by a major inconsistency in Peirce and Johnson's presentation. For several weeks, their report faulted San Antonio for not being more like other American cities, especially for being unlike cities they judge to be successful economically.
Then they attempted to deal constructively (rather than negatively) with at least part of San Antonio's fundamental differences as urban place.
For a moment, at least, they forgot their boiler plate approach. Unfortunately, in warning San Antonians against "its fatal drift into developing, physically, like every other place in faceless Subdivision USA," they retreated into a fuzzy notion of "cultural competence."
San Antonio, they write, is "already defined by its successful mixing of peoples, a living definition of cultural competence."
Although they sound positive and multicultural, the authors never explain "cultural competence." Rather, they risk confusion and misunderstanding — theirs and their readers.
Peirce and Johnson also come too close to praising a contemporary situation that's mired in inequalities and inequities among different groups and geographic areas.
"Cultural competence" seems to be little more than another word for marketing: "To be truly competitive in a global century, companies will have to learn much more about the varying and distinctive cultures of their customers, their suppliers, and, of course, their own employees."
Frankly, I can't tell what they meant by either "cultural" or "competence."
On one hand, Peirce and Johnson state a truism about marketing "culture(s)," which is already a common refrain among economists, marketers of all kinds, city boosters and their high-tech service providers.
On the other hand, they restrict the meanings and the usefulness of recognizing differences cultural, social, economic, and historical.
Simultaneously, they want San Antonio to promote its distinct "cultural competence" in order to grow more similar to other, advancing U.S. cities.
The echoes in talk around town aren't accidental. San Antonians, who are often (but not always) proud of their city's differences, have trouble maintaining a sense of difference when comparing their city's present position with other urban places that seem to be faring better economically.
The popular game of comparing and rating cities also makes it hard to develop a useful sense of distinction.
Notions of difference also get swallowed up quickly when economic indicators or forecasts come to dominate discussions.
Within their awareness that San Antonio is different, and that much of its difference is, broadly speaking, cultural (and necessarily, historical), Peirce and Johnson point to an opening for broad, constructive ideas about building upon San Antonio's distinctive cultural heritage and cultural base.
Unfortunately, they are unable to follow it themselves. For example, while they are surely right (and unoriginal) in underscoring the importance of the city center, they don't attempt to connect physically, culturally, or economically the sometimes sprawling sectors of the city with its historic core.
Nor do they pursue the fundamental questions about vital yet uncertain (but different?) economic growth.
Unfortunately, in their references to the Express-News city and cultural columnist Mike Greenberg's writing, Peirce and Johnson get the title of his interesting book wrong: It is "The Poetics of Cities," not "The Politics of Cities."
This slip is revealing, I think. It is only one example of a too narrow reading of the city's culture and its paths of urban development, past and future. "Culture," however defined, has as much to do with poetics — and with history and differences — as it does with politics.
Cities, in fact, are very much about how those qualities get transformed into physical or built space and into people place. These can be slippery, overlapping notions; nevertheless, they are useful. They create the very possibilities of building upon, of developing difference.
Peirce and Johnson missed an opportunity to spark a new conversation about San Antonio. This discussion, even debate, I would argue, is urgently needed. Too much of what passed for "debate" during the recent mayor's race missed this opportunity too.
The touted new UDC — which I support — may also run the risk of slighting or obscuring local differences, especially long-standing and historical ones, in seeking "new urban" futures.
Plans for a "new" San Antonio based on imitating the successes, often three or four decades old, for high-tech growth in Silicon Valley or Austin, or biomedical advances in San Diego, forget the multiple differences: of specific historical time or moments, of economic and technological possibilities and of cultural, historical and geographic distinctions.
"Things change," as they say. Those "things" suggest that San Antonio in 2001 is not likely to repeat the success of San Diego in the 1960s-80s or Austin in the 1980s-90s. And differences remain, including the recent decline among high technology over-builders.
What doesn't change are the many people who never prospered in the first place; many inequalities were not touched by recent transformations.
Missing as well in the Peirce and Johnson articles is a central question for all of us who care about the condition of San Antonio today and its possible futures. Seemingly simple but in fact very complicated, that question is:
Can San Antonio develop and grow, with the gains shared among all its peoples, in ways that nurture and retain its distinctive cultural and historical differences?
How can difference be constructive, productive and beneficial? Can specific avenues of economic development — beyond tourism and limited kinds of marketing — be developed that enhance difference?
This means, for example, innovative economic projects, investments and jobs that go well beyond often low-paying positions in one "service sector" or another.
It also means thinking creatively about education at all levels and not simply assuming that more schooling leads automatically to more high-tech jobs, rising personal incomes and rising levels of individual and household wealth.
High-tech job growth is important, but if San Antonio chooses to build
upon its difference, rather than seeking similarities, we need to consider
all the pieces of a huge and ever-shifting puzzle.
Can San Antonio do this? Can San Antonians afford not to try?
We need a wide-ranging discussion across the communities.
Harvey J. Graff is a professor of history at UTSA, where he teaches
courses on urban and social history.
06/24/2001
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