Why the "wrong side of the tracks" is usually the east side of cities | Stephen DeBerry

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4 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do communities on the social, economic and environmental margins have in common? For one thing, they tend to be on the east sides of cities. In this short talk about a surprising insight, anthropologist and venture capitalist Stephen DeBerry explains how both environmental and man-made factors have led to disparity by design in cities from East Palo Alto, California to East Jerusalem and beyond — and suggests some elegant solutions to fix it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:05.0	I was born and raised in East Harlem,
0:10.0	also known as Spanish Harlem, also known as El Barrio.
0:15.0	My parents moved to the neighborhood in 1974 from Stuyvesant town on the Lower East Side.
0:21.0	We lived in a complex of four buildings which meant that my
0:25.0	sisters and I were never short of folks to play with and you know what our favorite
0:29.8	game was? Tag, all over my building.
0:34.0	We'd run up and down 32 floors engaging in shenanigans.
0:39.0	Growing up in Harlem was a wonderful experience,
0:42.0	but many would consider where I lived was a wonderful experience.
0:42.6	But many would consider where I lived
0:45.4	to be the quote, wrong side of the tracks.
0:48.4	The way people talked about East Harlem then
0:51.0	was dramatically different from the way they talked about, say, the upper east
0:55.1	side where I went to school. Maybe that isn't necessarily the case anymore. I
0:59.9	mean, I've seen my parents neighborhood change over the years, but a lot of that change has to do with gentrification.
1:08.5	A lot of the black and brown folks who live there have since been pushed out. So what I really want to know is what a
1:15.6	city looks like when there's intentional urban design that benefits everyone, not just the moneyed few.
1:24.0	I'm a dupeck and Ola, this is Ted Business.
1:30.0	Our speaker today is Anthropologist and venture capitalist Stephen de Berry.
1:35.0	Stephen says that environmental and economic inequity across neighborhoods,
1:40.0	especially those on the east side of town is no accident.
	...

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