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Abstract
This essay explores the term ‘desert’ in the context of urban redevelopment. The essay draws out the contradictions of our contemporary planning condition that enables a massive new food distribution center to be placed in a beleagured community labeled a food and mobility desert—such that the new distribution center does not change life, food, or transit access for anyone who lives there. Theorizing a spatial-temporal mismatch between place and region that effectively starves communities to feed broader markets, this essay complicates the politics and potentials of food in the struggle for space against market logics that frame community access to food otherwise. The essay posits that to understand the violence of the contemporary American ‘desert,’ even the construction of the term itself, we should look critically at those most celebrated sites of regional economic growth—battleground sites that architects and planners are invariably complicit in reproducing.
Notes
1 Lela Nargi, “Critics say it’s time to stop using the term ‘food deserts,’” The Counter, September 16, 2021, https://thecounter.org/critics-say-its-time-to-stop-using-the-term-food-deserts-food-insecurity/. See also Jessica Fu, “Is it time to retire the term ‘food desert?,’” The Counter, January 9, 2020, https://thecounter.org/is-it-time-to-retire-the-term-food-desert-grocery-snap/.
2 United States Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas (2019 data): https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas/. Accessed December, 2022.
3 John A. Wright Sr., Kinloch Missouir’s First Black City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000).
4 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism,” in Architecture is All Over, eds. Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017).
5 US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year Estimates (2021). Retrieved from Census Reporter profile page for Kinloch, MO, http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US2938972-kinloch-mo/.
6 John A. Wright Sr., Kinloch Missouri’s First Black City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000).
7 Wright, Kinloch Missouri’s First Black City.
8 See Gwendolyn Wright, Through the Eyes of a Child Oral History Project, transcripts (Missouri Historical Society Kinloch interviews, 1998).
9 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism.”
10 Kristen Cloud, “Schnucks Building New DC In Kinloch, Missouri,” The Shelby Report, May 28, 2015, https://www.theshelbyreport.com/2015/05/28/schnucks-building-new-dc-in-kinloch-missouri/.
11 United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Missouri, “Former St. Louis County Executive Steven V. Stenger Sentenced to Federal Prison for “Pay to Play” Bribery Scheme,” press release, August 9, 2019; Ashley Cole, Erin Richey, Jacob Long, “Steve Stenger sentenced to 46 months in prison in pay-to-play scheme,” 5 On Your Side Local News, August 9, 2019. https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/steve-stenger-sentenced-to-46-months-in-prison-in-pay-to-play-scheme/63-50fc3a72-ab62-4e9b-a4d0-62c0e6c879fb. Accessed July, 2023.
12 United States Attorney’s Office, “Former St. Louis County Executive.”
13 This discussion expands from early notions of a scalar disjoint between lived space and global economic imperatives in Kinloch. See: Patty Heyda, “Quality Urbanism--We Got What We Wanted But We Lost What We Had,” Conditions, Issue #5/6 2010.
14 Patty Heyda, “Unbuilding and Rebuilding St. Louis,” in St. Louis Currents: Facing Regional Issues at 250, eds. Andrew Theising and Terrence Jones (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2016).
15 Lambert St. Louis International Airport, Baseline Mitigation Eligibility Areas, map, September 12, 2005.
16 A finding of ‘blight’ supports the adoption of a redevelopment plan “between the City of St. Louis and Kinloch TIF, Inc”: City of St. Louis Ordinance No.68084, Board Bill #145, June 27, 2008, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/city-laws/upload/legislative//Ordinances/BOAPdf/ordinance68084.pdf
17 NorthPark brochure, “Building the Momentum,” http://www.northparkstl.com/, accessed June, 2022.
18 NorthPark brochure, “Building the Momentum.”
19 See John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 2007).
20 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017).
21 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism.”
22 These ideas draw on Herscher’s descriptions of the term ‘blight’ and how it is construed toward this redevelopment end in the case of Detroit. See Andrew Herscher, “‘Blight,’ Spatial Racism, and the Demolition of the Housing Question in Detroit” in Housing After the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies, Wohnungsfrage, eds. Stefan Aue et al. (Spector Books, 2015).
23 For more on urban regime theory, see Clarence Stone, Regime Politics Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (University Press of Kansas, 1989).
24 Paul Hampel, “Urban Farmers Working Vacant Kinloch Property Get Surprise When Land’s Rightful Owner Shows Up,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 2015, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/urban-farmers-working-vacant-kinloch-property-get-surprise-when-lands-rightful-owner-shows-up/article_a69bbb45-2cc1-542d-b7c0-51e6205c8e2c.html.
25 Paul Hampel, “Urban Farmers.”
26 As described poignantly in this architecture studio prompt: Cory Henry, “The Paradox of Hunger,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2022, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/course/the-paradox-of-hunger-rural-mississippi-fall-2022/. Accessed February, 2022.
27 David Jones, “Supersized Sugary Drinks Target the Poor,” Community Service Society, July 26, 2012, https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/supersized-sugary-drinks-target-the-poor.
28 Claire Nowak, “The Real Way McDonald’s Makes Their Money—It’s Not Their Food,” Reader’s Digest, July 19, 2021, https://www.rd.com/article/real-way-mcdonalds-makes-money/. My casting of the McDonalds as important site of community connection expands on earlier discussion of the Ferguson QuikTrip gas station in: Heidi Aronson Kolk and Michael Allen, “Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip?” NextSTL, September 2, 2014, https://amcs.wustl.edu/news/can-we-preserve-quiktrip.
29 Alexander Kaufman and Hunter Stuart, “How One McDonald’s Became The Epicenter Of The Ferguson Conflict,” Huffington Post, August 19, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ferguson-mcdonalds_n_5689428.
30 The references to the power of place as layers of territorial history are drawn from Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Boston: MIT Press, 1997).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Patty Heyda
Patty Heyda is an associate professor of architecture and urban design at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is also affiliated faculty at the Center for Race, Equity and Ethnicity and in the American Culture Studies program. Heyda researches American cities and urban redevelopment, with a focus on inequality and political economic privatization in weak-market contexts like St. Louis. She is the co-author of Rebuilding the American City (Routledge, 2016) and Rebuilding Small Towns (Routledge, forthcoming), with David Gamble; and Radical Atlas (Belt, forthcoming). Heyda has worked professionally in architecture and urban design in Europe and the US. Previously, she taught at Harvard and Northeastern University.