Reflections • Community
Reflections – Community
Our attachments to our communities tend to mutate over the course of a lifetime. Since one in five Americans moves every year, even the communities of which we are a part change. The United States of America has always been a nation with a large population of immigrants, for whom not only community but country has changed, often dramatically. Think of the culture shock, for instance, in moving from Somalia to the U.S. Yet there is a substantial and growing Somali culture in the U.S., one that is finding its own ingenious ways of adapting and assimilating while retaining its own distinct identity, as every other culture has tended to do for centuries.
By contrast, my own evolution is modest but nonetheless, for me, significant. I grew up in suburban Cleveland. I now live in the heart of Chicago. In the interim between the two, I lived for several years in Iowa, then married a Nebraskan, settling in Omaha for just a few months before landing a job in Chicago. Because my father grew up in Queens, I was born in New York. If there is consistency, it is that I seem to be moving back and forth along the 41st to 42nd parallel. I am pretty much a life-long Midwesterner.
Cleveland taught me a lot and bred an activist who was transformed into an urban planner, turning commitment to community into a career. The big change came in my college years. Moving from a high-quality suburban high school to a downtown urban university–in 1968, of all years–produced an abrupt awareness of the range of issues facing our urban communities. Cleveland State University, centered at E. 24th and Euclid Avenues, was in the center of a political universe that witnessed civil rights marches, the election of the first Black mayor of a major American city (Carl Stokes, 1967-1971), the emergence of an environmental movement for which Cleveland was ground zero in gritty industrial pollution, and a potent anti-war movement that protested the Vietnam conflict in marches that regularly proceeded right past the campus down Euclid Avenue to Public Square. Although I began my academic career as an English major who had founded the Writers Club at Brecksville High School, by my junior year a rapidly growing fascination with the issues of the world lured me to switch majors to political science. Over time, first on campus, and later in the larger community, I became active in a number of organizations.
CRANDIC railroad bridge collapses under pressure of 2008 floods in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Eventually, I became executive director of the Iowa Public Interest Research Group. I moved to Iowa in January 1979, and social change, in the form of consumer and environmental advocacy, became a full-time job. Iowa PIRG, however, was plagued with more fundraising challenges than I initially realized, and despite some successes, the time came to move on. I applied to graduate school at the University of Iowa, undertaking a double master’s program in Journalism and Urban and Regional Planning. The first let me improve my writing and communication skills; the second let me acquire vital skills for tackling needed community change on a more professional level. Exactly what I was going to do with those two degrees, I had no idea. I simply knew that the combination would let me carve out a unique path ideally suited to my own gifts. I realized I finally understood what I was about and what special talents God had bestowed on me. And I have always believed that talents bestow responsibilities.
It did not take long to find ways to marry those two areas of expertise. I turned my Master’s Project into a published book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press, 1988). I created an oral history of the Midwest farm credit crisis of the 1980s by interviewing more than 70 farmers across several states, learning in the process a great deal about rural communities and their economies. I also became intimately more familiar with the landscape of Iowa than might have been possible simply by living in Iowa City while studying. That knowledge became very useful in later circumstances, including both the 1993 and 2008 Midwest floods, and the opportunity to return to the university to teach as an adjunct planning professor as a result of the 2008 disaster.
By the time the book was published, however, I was firmly implanted in the city of Chicago. I became enamored of book-length journalism at the same time that I was working full-time for the American Planning Association, first as an assistant editor for Planning, and later in the Research Department. With a growing interest in urban environmental planning, I harked back to my Cleveland roots and found a new book topic in the rapidly growing environmental justice movement. There was plenty of raw material in both Cleveland and Chicago, but I broadened my sights and used networking skills to identify and interview more than 300 people nationwide in places like Louisiana, Southern California, American Indian communities, Appalachia, and the Midwest to stitch together Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America (Sierra Club Books, 1994).
I had worked my way through college as a summer worker in a chemical plant after spending high school summers at an Ohio Turnpike oasis. The book was in many ways a statement of my blue-collar roots and a commitment to justice based on advanced environmental and social awareness that integrated many strands of the complex activist I had become. During the more than three years I spent on it, friends and publishers alike often questioned the viability of the entire topic. Was there such a thing as an African American, Hispanic, or blue-collar environmental activist? I became acutely aware of the limited frames of vision through which many Americans, most particularly many intellectuals, viewed social movements. Yet today the concept of environmental justice as an analytical framework for social change is widely accepted. It was not just the reality of the community that had to change. The very perception of that reality had to shift as well.
But that was not to be my final personal and professional transformation. Before that book saw the light of day, Bill Klein, then the director of research at APA, asked me to take charge of a new project, underwritten by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to produce a research report on “Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction.” Because it seemed to have at least a tangential connection with my environmental interests, I agreed. What I did not understand when I took that assignment was how much more than environmental planning is involved in disaster recovery. In fact, the topic covers a vast range of subtopics entailed in rebuilding entire communities that have been devastated by disaster. It involves environmental restoration, of course, but also housing, community and economic redevelopment, restoration of essential services, rebuilding a sense of community where much community has been lost, and, in the final analysis, as we learned after Hurricane Katrina, rebuilding confidence and creating resilience that may well have been waning for years before disaster finally struck. And that is only the beginning. I now have an entire library of books and reports devoted to the topic and have become a certified instructor for FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute, teaching professional training courses on state and local planning for recovery.
I developed a professional passion for this issue because I saw a huge gap in hazard mitigation and disaster recovery that I thought planners could or would be well-trained to fill. Most hazard mitigation, the steps we take to make our homes and communities more disaster-resistant, involves some component of building codes and standards, land-use choices and regulations by states and communities, and a planning process that came to be enshrined in federal law under the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. Disaster recovery has many parallels to the typical comprehensive planning that most communities undertake and some states require, with the singular exception that it is undertaken with extreme time pressures because people need housing, businesses need to reopen, schools need to reopen, etc. It is a famously complex topic, but one for which planners are well suited. Over time, the interest within the profession skyrocketed, and the numerous research and training projects I undertook at APA contributed significantly to that trend. I was thrilled to be at the center of much of the action and proud to initiate much of it. Much of the information on my career (and a list of Publications) can be found on my business website, www.jimschwabconsulting.com. The Midwest floods of 2008 also led to an invitation to teach a course on “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs that year. I am still there as an adjunct assistant professor. Since then, I have been honored to be inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP) and to receive the Goddard-White Award, their highest award, from the Association of State Floodplain Managers.
By 2017, however, I decided it was time to move on to what I call “alleged retirement,” a mix of activities still devoted to community, consulting, teaching, and writing, along with adequate room for relaxation and vacations. My wife had already retired from teaching in the Chicago Public Schools. We began my new odyssey by joining two other recently retired co-workers on a fjord cruise in Norway, which allowed me to visit numerous communities with very different environmental circumstances from those typically seen in the U.S., yet planned with some noteworthy sophistication and understanding of their own history. Over time, and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have shifted more time to volunteer work and worried less about earning extra money, although I am also undertaking a new book project that I hope to complete in 2025. Among other things, I served as Chair of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, serving those planners who have shown a special interest in helping communities prepare for and recover from disasters and plan for the impacts of climate change.
I am currently involved in two major volunteer projects. One involves a film about community planning for resilience, titled Planning to Turn the Tide. The other involves using a grant (based on a proposal I wrote) from the City of Chicago to install a rooftop solar energy system that will power Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park. Both relate very closely to the commitment to community that made me a planner. Both make me proud of my chosen path.