Downtown Kingston has been growing increasingly attractive. New buildings are being constructed. Old ones are being renovated. Well-appointed restaurants are beckoning not just as alternative lunch spots during the workday but as unconventional venues for nightlife.
To some people, this is the natural end-product of beautification. This might just be another way of saying gentrification. Others are just happy that downtown Kingston is being restored to its former glory. Whatever it is, both KinTeet and HeartBun are agreed that there needs to be an understanding of how the city came to the state where it had to become the subject of long-term restoration plans requiring people with money no longer having to imagine how to invest to make it a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Further, how could a younger generation admit to having nothing but ‘imaginings’ on which to anchor their participation in this redevelopment?
HeartBun blames it all on poor stewardship. Something akin to the athletes in the relay in Doha who seemed to just know in which direction to run but whether the baton should be passed at all, from whom, and to whom? There ought to be some governance that is founded on, and influenced by, what is considered valuable in a belief system which then impacts actions that sustain national growth and development from one generation to the next. According to HeartBun, the very social challenges that, in his view, lead to the demise of the city are present and threatening in its redevelopment. In the streets and lanes not far from the beautification project, there are people eking out an existence where the very collection of the by-products of a demanding day in business is uncertain. Call that lack of governance evidenced in failure to collect garbage if you wish.
KinTeet knows that it requires little more than a casual glance to see persons struggling each morning with two or three suitcases or barrels of a variety of items be offered for sale. Before they get their hustle on, they take in the role of sanitation workers. Shortly, thereafter, they participate in the construction industry, setting up enclosures made of tarpaulin, any existing fencing or stakes that are available, before putting their skills at artistry in storefront design to display their merchandise. Then manage the floor, engaging people who just pass by to look in the hope that they could actually be transformed into an active consumer and a deal could be closed.
All the while they keep watch for any breach that might cause a visit from a properly authorised enforcement officer who may or may not be minded to be lenient. At the end of the day, the entire process has to be reversed, sale or no sale, hopes realised or not. Tomorrow is another day and time to start all over again.
There is an abundance of potentially productive entrepreneurial energies that are marginalised on the sidewalks just a stone’s throw from where the city is being regenerated. Take a walk along the famed waterfront, and you could almost see the dividing line between where the well-manicured green lawns and landscaped area ends and where no one seems to care how many plastic bottles line the pavement. Yet on one side of this divide, there is so much of what is sometimes referenced, though not really celebrated or rewarded, as the spirit and soul of Jamaica. The never-say-die attitude, seven times rise and seven times fall and seven times get up again. The will to innovate, the ability to create where artistic inclinations are likely to come as unexpected.
HeartBun knows that the success of regeneration is hinged on these energies, on the business acumen of the marginalised who get up while the potential patrons of more established enterprises are still asleep and sweep the street, clean up the business place, make it customer-ready, offer to wash a car or two belonging to those who are ‘doing business’ and return to hustle at it all over again tomorrow.
In the end, the city will be imagined on that which we value. Everything we value would have been created by people who too often are asked to leave themselves outside the door, on the walls at the water’s edge, or wherever else is prescribed as the safe distance from the safe zone of gentrification. The challenge is how to make and maintain the connection so that a beautiful but empty city does not become the long term outcome of our imaginings.
HeartBun invoked Martin Luther King, “There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society protect that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”
Deliberate and planned inclusion will also facilitate the release of a full range of cultural expressions that will add its own value to sustaining regeneration by mooring the city in its history, preserved in the lives of those who are valued.
Amina Blackwood-Meeks, PhD, Cultural Studies, is a lecturer and college orator at The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.
