Laura Testino

So began a 25-minute panel discussion featuring the experience, thoughtfulness and wit of writer Jesmyn Ward and writer-comedian Baratunde Thurston in conversation with Ginia Bellafante, the Big City Columnist for The New York Times.

“Has the narrative of black poverty been lost?” Bellafante began by asking, and if so, “How do we get it back?” Or, is the best answer to create a new one?

Ward and Thurston are known for writing about their experiences as black people in America, elevating voices they know and love and that Ward said she rarely came across as a young and voracious reader in rural DeLisle, Mississippi.

Ward said the characters that informed her award-winning novels — like Esch in “Salvage the Bones” (2011) and Jojo in “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) — often “come to me because they have been lost to history.” The narrative of her community hasn’t necessarily been erased, but rather ignored, and that’s why she is committed to writing about it.

“We just want to see ourselves,” Thurston said, humorously adding that earlier in the day he’d been mistaken as Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California, who participated in a panel later that afternoon.

Thurston grew up in Washington in the 1980s and wrote about his experiences in his book “How to Be Black” (2012). He and Ward discussed being called the anomalies and exceptions in their communities, the ones who were able to satisfy this “need to escape” and make it out to find success.

Ward defined such success as having the means to solve the problems that compounded with poverty, such as access to health care, a good education and the ability to save money.

Ward is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans, but she lives in DeLisle, a decision she reckoned with in a Time magazine essay published in July 2018.

Thurston said his ability to leave Washington for Boston, Los Angeles and New York City wasn’t because he was particularly exceptional or smarter. Instead, he was lucky. But the narrative around black poverty, he said, is one that’s systemic and often born of moral and personal failure.

Efforts to improve cities aren’t always developed from local communities themselves, Thurston explained, but rather via a path developed and implemented from the outside, often benefiting the new and predominantly white population.

Black people “are like the place holders for the future artisanal food truck industry,” he said, elaborating that it was then their responsibility to react to the economic changes of the neighborhood.

This often creates a pattern of displacement, meaning the community that was supposed to be helped can’t afford to reap the benefits.

The conversation continued in a discussion of rural-urban relationships, like the farm-to-table dining trend: “Is it beneficial or just hipster nonsense?” Bellafante asked.

Ward said her rural Mississippi community was still seeing the effects of Hurricane Katrina, with fewer people living near the coasts and trees growing at a slant directed by the storm’s winds. Thurston shared what he described as his girlfriend’s observation that the suburbs fit into the mix, too, as young people who grew up there moved to enjoy the benefits of a city but were more accustomed to having their own spaces and cars.

But the most prominent solution discussed was perhaps embedded in Ward’s and Thurston’s framing of their own responses: the caveat that they could only speak for themselves, and their own communities.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/us/changing-the-narrative-around-black-poverty.html" id="b8c34f15-ea43-310a-a803-88bb947f75b0">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — For a topic heavily critiqued and obsessively discussed, particularly since the 2016 presidential election, the contrast of rural America’s suffering and urban America’s revitalization is often told in stories that focus on white people.

Changing the Narrative Around Black Poverty

The Vertical Forest prototype was first constructed four years ago in Milan, Italy, where a pair of apartment buildings also housed 21,000 plants and 20 species of birds.

Cities cover only about 3 percent of the Earth’s land, Boeri said during his presentation at the conference. But they are responsible for 70 percent of the world’s energy consumption and 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change, which threatens to significantly alter New Orleans and the Southeast, according to a federal National Climate Assessment report released last month.

The beauty of incorporating more trees and plant life in urban architecture is that the trees both assist in absorbing carbon dioxide and in producing more oxygen.

The process begins by selecting plants that would be suited for the environment of the city. “So we in a way design and build houses for trees,” Boeri said.

Boeri has been asked about replicating the idea all over the world. “For sure we didn’t copyright it because we think there are and could be many other architects that can do better than us,” he said.

For each city Boeri starts over, creating something distinct for the climate and biodiversity, embracing the chance to experiment and improve. Such efforts have already resulted in lower costs of construction, he said.

He gave examples of how Vertical Forests would be different in cities in the Netherlands, France, China and Manhattan. The design proposal made for Manhattan incorporates both trees and greenhouses. If 15 of his 1,000-foot Vertical Forest buildings were constructed in the city, Boeri said, together they would have the same number of trees that are found within the 840 acres of Central Park.

Vertical Forests are created for the building’s complex ecosystem to succeed in highly dense metropolitan areas. But proposals for a Forest City are also in the works in China. The various Vertical Forest-style buildings there would support an area of about 30,000 people.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations held the first World Forum on Urban Forests recently in Mantova, Italy, and 93 countries attended, Boeri said. They compared solutions and spoke about ways urban forests could be part of cities’ efforts to “stop and reverse” their positions on climate change.

“We have to imagine how we could communicate the fact that you can intervene in a very efficient way,” and be optimistic about the possibilities available for stopping climate change, Boeri said, rather than only being fearful of the effects.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/stefano-boeri-vertical-forests-cities-conference.html" id="c608ecfc-0a4b-3a0c-a5bc-fc4dfbed0d2d">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — The Vertical Forest buildings of the architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri make the most of the often overlooked and profound contributions of a single tree.

The Allure of Vertical Forests

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Laura Testino

Articles written by the author

Changing the Narrative Around Black Poverty

The Allure of Vertical Forests