On August 10th, 2010, the Salt Lake City Council voted to adopt the North Temple Boulevard Master Plan. A decade later, that plan would be used to displace at least three families from their homes. In 2019 the Kozo displaced two families, three years later the Chicago Street Townhomes displaced another. All three families wereContinue reading “Planning for Displacement: Gentrification and the North Temple Boulevard Master Plan”
Republishing: Situationist Theses on Traffic
These theses were written by the French author Guy Debord in 1959. Despite being over 60 years old, many of these theses remain true today or were true and are now in the process of being overcome as new forms of capitalist urbanism gain ground. In this short writing, Debord succinctly explores key functions ofContinue reading “Republishing: Situationist Theses on Traffic”
Don’t Expect Gentrifiers to Understand | A Response to Building Salt Lake
This article is a response to an article written by Taylor Anderson for Building Salt Lake on the Kozo apartment complex on Feb. 17, 2022: https://www.buildingsaltlake.com/west-side-project-that-stalled-amid-protests-is-back-with-revisions/ Two weeks ago, Taylor Anderson wrote an article for Building Salt Lake looking at the updated plans for the Kozo House Apartments development in the Rose Park neighborhood. ApartContinue reading “Don’t Expect Gentrifiers to Understand | A Response to Building Salt Lake”
Transit Done Wrong
During the George Floyd uprising in the Summer of 2020, the marches through Salt Lake City would often stop on one of the Trax lines downtown with the “organizers” of the march claiming that by disrupting the Trax we were in fact putting a damper on the creation of money (that is value production) inContinue reading “Transit Done Wrong”
Redlining | Laying the Foundations of a Segregated City
The history of city planning is the history of spatial segregation. It surprises no-one that there are upper and lower class areas in cities, affordability is often the privilege of pollution, disrepair, concentrated poverty, and disinvestment. In Salt Lake County, the divide is stark, following the topography of the valley. The upper class neighborhoods sitContinue reading “Redlining | Laying the Foundations of a Segregated City”
Capital-Oriented Development
Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is all the rage, seemingly the perfect solution to our current housing and climate crises. Dense, often mixed use, development close to public transit brings urban living to suburban neighborhoods and encourages transit-use over car-use, what more could you ask for? In fact, even the Utah State Legislature is so taken withContinue reading “Capital-Oriented Development”
Starting Deconstruct Salt Lake
This blog started as a series of articles I wrote for Deserted News. As I explored the cities, spaces, and places in the Salt Lake Valley from a radical lens, I realized that alongside the ever-expanding institutions of capitalist city-building (real-estate, finance, developers, local/regional/state/federal government, etc.), the forces advocating for property owners and capital wereContinue reading “Starting Deconstruct Salt Lake”