City planning contributed to poverty, and influenced the demonstrations that took place following the shooting death of Michael Brown.
Protesters on West Florissant on Aug. 19.
AP Charlie Riedel
FERGUSON, MISSOURI — When you walk down West Florissant, where the protests following the shooting death of Michael Brown happened, you notice a curious thing: It's awfully rough.
Not rough in the sense that a lot of crime takes place here, but rough in the literal sense. There's fractured asphalt, a mishmash of strip malls, and treeless sidewalks that fade gradually into busy lanes of traffic. There are good things happening on the street — shops, restaurants, passionate people — but as a physical space it's indistinct, more like a scorched concrete field than a focused boulevard.
And yet, for much of August the street morphed into a dynamic, if sometimes violent, civic gathering space. It became a kind of public square, which is surprising because other recent protest movements have been tied to spaces that were already intentionally civic: the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square; the Ukrainian revolution in Independence Square; Occupy in Zuccotti Park.
But there is no equivalent space in Ferguson. Not even close.
A panorama of West Florissant in the middle of the protest zone.
Since the death of Michael Brown, there have been two narratives about space in Ferguson: stories about the battles and street protests, and stories of poverty and segregation that discussed longer term issues.
Urban planners say that a series of physical conditions that exist in Ferguson contribute to poverty, and those same conditions influenced the protests. City design helped created a powder keg. As engineer Charles Marohn put it, "The fact of the matter is it's a placemaking issue. It's the way these places were built."
Here's why:
