Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a Black social psychiatrist
with wide-ranging interests; her book analyzes factors that support or diminish
the health of cities as places that sustain its citizens. Over many years, she
has visited and studied 178 cities in 14 countries, and she draws on the work
of experts from several disciplines to address the fundamental question: how
may we best live together?
Her discussion moves through five concepts for understanding the health of a
city by describing a dozen cities ranging from Paris to Jersey City. Each
features a “Scroll,” a two-page presentation of photos, graphics, and text. Her
discussions give an inductive basis for her concepts that become criteria for
assessing the health of any city.
(1) Box (“in all sizes and shapes”): the surrounding shape of buildings,
street, and sky; it gives an identity to the city’s center with its useful
assets such as stores, post office, bank, food, and entertainment.
(2) Circle: the larger area surrounding a Box—maybe a half a mile in radius.
Its health requires ease of travel to and from the box.
(3) Line: usually the Main Street that runs through the box,
therefore a central path to town. Good transportation is important, and the
main street can be quite long, for example Palisades Avenue in Englewood, New
Jersey.
(4) Tangle: a dense network of streets and highways that connect to main
streets and the Box.
(5) Time: no city is static; as years go by, there are changes for good or
ill.
Fullilove mentions politics, capitalism, poverty, disincentives, tribalism,
racism, highways, malls, interstates, and “urban renewal” that destroyed
neighborhoods of minorities, as well as redlining against Blacks and
gerrymandering school districts to segregate Black and white students.
In “Naming and Framing the Problem,” she turns to a larger overview of
challenges for cities in many places, but especially in the US: (1) “deep structure of inequality” (p. 211), such as the legacies
of slavery, lynching, the 3/5 Compromise, and the Trail of Tears, as well as
white supremacy today (2) ecological damage, including industrial farming,
deforestation, and global warming, and (3) the inertia of the status quo.
Citing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Father Richard Rohr, Fullilove affirms love
as the root for social justice,
political activism (p. 211) so that cities might become what Thomas Edison
termed “factories of invention” that will support the mental health and
well-being of all of its citizens.
