Urban Activist Majora Carter Promotes "Greening the Ghetto"

April 19, 2013

By Tom Prigg

Internationally renowned urban revitalization strategist and real estate developer Majora Carter visited Pittsburgh recently. She came to town as part of the Green Building Alliance and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden’s Inspire Speakers Series.

Carter is known for using phrases like "greening the ghetto" to promote projects that simultaneously work toward environmental justice and urban redevelopment. For her efforts, she’s been awarded a MacArthur Genius and Peabody award. But she’s also stirred a bit of controversy.

Recently she made headlines in the New York Times after being hired to help a fresh food shipping company build a large facility in the South Bronx. Activists feared the facility would create pollution from increased truck traffic. They labeled Carter a traitor to her own neighborhood and her causes, as she started her career fighting truck traffic.

However, she maintained that these trucks use natural gas as a fuel, instead of diesel, and are 90-percent emisions free compared to diesel engines. The new facility would also provide thousands of new jobs for the borough.

“Building community is hard," Carter said. "Coming up with strategies that really support the economic development, as well as the social and environmental development of our community, involves a really careful application of understanding the needs of our neighbors and our friends."

“Greening the ghetto” is the idea that poverty and crime rates can be improved once green areas have been developed in low income neighborhoods.

Those new green spaces create desirable areas for people to relocate and where businesses can flourish, Carter said, noting the key to community development is economic diversity. New businesses create jobs, provide retail and services, and keep money circulating within the borough.

According to Carter, it was the practice of “redlining” that caused neighborhood blight in the Bronx. An illegal and discriminatory practice, redlining involves banks' drawing lines around poor areas that would not receive loans for renovations or development. Consequently, the Bronx fell into despair. “If people do not feel safe sending their kids out to play, they are not going to,” said Carter.

When poverty is concentrated, it creates more poverty, she said. By continuing the greening initiatives, Carter hopes to improve economic development and standards of living. 

Living in a blighted neighborhood teaches residents from their earliest days that "your community is worthless, your community is a warzone, you must be worthless too," she said, noting that blight, like nature, has a psychological impact.

"When you're in nature, it does these things to you. It calms you, and it makes you experience yourself as a integral part of the world that you live in," she said.

Listen to the full speech above