1A the turn of the 21st Century, professionals and wealthy suburbanites are moving back to central cities attracted by their trendy industrial character, restaurants and clubs, art performances, or streets festivals1. Studies of inner city neighborhoods have explained economic growth and development through processes of gentrification, land value, nostalgia, or creativity, which focus on the wealthy newcomers. Instead, I propose to focus on the diverse inner city actors and their ability to create their own intense urban vitality, which became attractive to newcomers and created a major driving force of development.

2The case of the Eastern Neighborhoods of San Francisco illustrates this production of vitality and recognizes the ability of inner city actors to create their own conditions of spatial justice. Until recently, the Eastern neighborhoods of San Francisco were the poorest, most marginal, and least desirable areas for investment. By the mid 2000s, they still displayed poverty, overcrowding, and drug dealing corners. But they also displayed a wealth of vibrant urban qualities. While marginal to the more traditional economic core of the city, these neighborhoods feature colorful streets and buildings bustling with small businesses producing services and goods, families raising children at community centers and parks, or artists creating new aesthetics on theaters and clubs. They offer colorful produce stores, industrial brick buildings and art workshops, restaurants with homemade-like food, clubs and theaters, and street fairs and parades. In this context, newcomers bring resources and new activities, but they are not creating new neighborhoods and a new urban vitality. Instead, they are attracted to the existing vitality. Their arrival in many cases led not only to the displacement of low-income residents but to the destruction of the very urban vitality they were pursuing in the first place.

3Confronted with the tensions between old residents and newcomers at a time of major economic transformation, the San Francisco local government unsuccessfully attempted to guide the development process and in many cases undermined the existing vitality and conditions of justice in the Eastern Neighborhoods. This failed attempt is rooted in a spatial approach that has a limited understanding of social relations, a narrow and suburban perspective of public place, and a parochial perspective oblivious of international flows. In spite of a poor planning initiatives and strong private investment pressures, Eastern Neighborhoods’actors have skillfully negotiated their place ownership and have enforced their conditions of spatial justice through intense exchanges with newcomers, developers, and local officials. This is a call for professional planners to carefully explore the vitality of the inner city neighborhoods.

4The purpose of this paper is to understand the social and political tensions in the development process of the Eastern Neighborhoods in San Francisco by recognizing the urban vitality created by the local actors and the tensions that arose as newcomers and government agencies stepped into these neighborhoods. More specifically, it explores the structural blind spots in the local planning process that constrained the conditions of spatial justice.

5After reviewing the social and economic trends of the Eastern Neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium, the paper focuses on the multiple development visions and spatial practices that were enacted as the City encountered increasing social tensions and political turmoil. This is followed by an assessment of the blind spots in development and planning practices. This empirical assessment is largely drawn from a participant observation approach given my role as a senior planner for the City of San Francisco. This assessment leads to a discussion of the production of spatial capital and the conditions of spatial justice as a proposal of new lenses for the planning practice.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC TRENDS

6The Eastern Neighborhoods (Figure 1) are infused with populations from various countries, particularly Latin America and Asia, which grew with a recent major wave of intense international exchange of goods, information, and cultural capital. They have created broad and strong networks across geographical, social, and economic boundaries providing an entry point for many immigrants, who could rapidly insert themselves into job networks, community networks, and cultural networks that ease their mobility around the city. Immigrants and their children intensify their exchanges with their homeland and express them in their everyday lives through places such as the pineapple and watermelon street cart, Chinese video shop, Chilean empanadas at Peña del Sur, Filipino breakfast joint, or Mariachis walking on the streets. These international flows have fostered multiple public cultural events, such as the Mexican Dia de Los Muertos or the Filipino Parol Lantern Festival. They have also led to the creation of a variety of ethnic restaurants and grocery stores as well as world music at the neighborhood clubs.

7Left to their own devices, outside of the rules and regulations or economic pressures of the rest of the city, the Eastern Neighborhoods had the freedom to engage in a wide range of activities, from manufacturing to retail to housing to entertainment. Unlike homogeneous neighborhoods almost exclusively dominated by residential buildings or high-rise office buildings, businesses and residents in the Eastern Neighborhoods spread throughout pockets of industrial activities that overlapped with entertainment clusters, retail corridors, and residential areas. One could walk by the Wonder Bread factory, the bus yard, a couple of garment factories, a wholesale trade shop of Asian spices and noodles, and then stroll by auto repair shops, a cluster of graphic designers and photographers, a taqueria and a café. Then, the next block could continue with a bustling commercial street with apartments on top; a bookstore, a laundry mat, a furniture repair shop, a Chinese restaurant, a pawn shop, a pizza place, a bike shop or a used clothes shop. Right around the corner, one could step into a quiet residential alley with two, three or four flats per building, kids arriving from school and elders walking to the post office.

8The Eastern Neighborhoods offered the social flexibility to accommodate gays, artists, and undocumented workers who were harassed in other places. More than many other neighborhoods in San Francisco, they accommodated populations looking for alternative lifestyles to the mainstream patterns of consumption2.

9These diverse urban actors of the Eastern Neighborhoods had the flexibility to expand their social and economic networks and use their buildings and streets for a wide range of activities in the most creative ways to produce an urban vitality in their own terms. This vitality of the marginal neighborhoods has been recognized before. One could trace this trend to the “black ghettos” of the 1960s in the US, as described by Manuel Castells3: “It was in this harsh urban land left behind by the happy suburbanites, where black people congregated in their churches and where autonomous social institutions were invented4 ”. Furthermore, Manuel Castells in his historical overview of grassroots organizing states that “. Only in the secrecy of their homes, in the complicity of their neighborhoods, in the communication of taverns, in the joy of street gatherings may they find values, ideas, projects and, finally, demands that do not conform to the dominant social interests5 ”. At the dawn of the 21^st Century, the values, ideas, and projects of the inner city population in San Francisco not only did not conform to the predominant social interests, but they became increasingly appealing to a wealthier population. In other words, the wealthier population was trying to appropriate from the marginal population the urban vitality of the inner city neighborhoods. This created a major challenge for the City given the multiple tensions that emerged as dissimilar sectors of the population struggled to produce, consume, appropriate, and transformed this vitality.

10These spatial transformations in the Eastern Neighborhoods were part of broader citywide, regional, and international trends. Towards the end of the 20^th Century, San Francisco experienced major economic and social changes in its interaction with major regional and international events. San Francisco retained much economic vitality through its traditional financial activities, but these activities were no longer the predominant function of the city. Specialized professional services, culture, and entertainment were becoming the center of attention and much of the growth and construction were driven by them. San Francisco’s core economy shifted from financial to specialized professional services with small pockets of emerging industries. In addition, the entertainment industry forcefully responded to the increasing global demands of urban consumption6.

11The strong profile in leisure and hospitality was reinforcing San Francisco’s role as a central city of upscale consumption not just for tourists but for an international business elite and a wealthier resident population that demanded major housing production. Since the late 1990s, new residents arrived to remodel Victorian houses, industrial buildings transformed into live/work units, new lofts, and new high-rise buildings. Some occupied new buildings; others displaced existing renters and businesses from existing buildings. Between 2000 and 2005 San Francisco produced almost 12,000 housing units and approved construction of 16,500 housing units7. More than one third of those 12,000 units were built immediately adjacent to the financial core, in the Eastern Neighborhoods. In addition, the northern areas of the Eastern Neighborhoods experienced higher increases in housing cost than any other neighborhoods in the city, and much higher than California or the US8. This new wave of housing production in and around downtown was not unique to San Francisco; Eugene Birch9 and Robert Beauregard10 have documented similar patterns throughout major US cities. In addition, over the last two decades, the growth of housing production contrasts with the decline in office production (Figure 2), which further illustrates the shift in the local economy priorities from finance towards consumption of urban amenities.

12But most dramatic was the decline in population during a period of major housing production. Between 2000 and 2005, San Francisco lost 35,700 people11. Furthermore, this decline in population was happening after 20 years of constant population growth.

Changes in Housing and Population 2000-2005

13This population change included an increase in the share of White and Asian population, and a decline in all other ethnic groups12, which reveals not only a change in density but the ethnic displacement. San Francisco was the only major city in the US that showed a decline in Latino population13. In summary, these demographic and housing production trends document the departure of many Latino, African-American, and Filipino families and the arrival of a wealthier, predominantly White population of singles, or couples with no children, who use more space per person. This strong demographic shift had an impact on the ethnic and cultural diversity of the city and the vitality of the Eastern Neighborhoods in particular.

14These changes in industries, housing production, and social composition of the city triggered major spatial tensions in the Eastern Neighborhoods. Too much money had arrived too fast in San Francisco and created much conflict. Dot-com companies were created overnight by a few young professionals coming together with good intentions but not much business experience or understanding of the neighborhood. This was followed by live/work and high-rise apartment buildings. The problem was not the arrival of money per se but the shape, form, and speed at which it arrived. It caught the City completely unprepared to guide its arrival. Displacement of individual families, businesses, and artists was a major problem, but this issue was amplified by the disruption of clusters of activities, social and economic networks, and neighborhood character. The displacement of the residents was not just a social loss but a loss of the urban vitality valued by a broad constituency.

Visions of the City

15At the turn of the millennium, the high level of social tension and political conflict afforded the city an opportunity to openly question its path of development. The major demonstrations and even acts of violence were important for the marginal communities to gain visibility in the politics of the city. But even more transcendental was the ability of community organizations to engage their very diverse populations with the local planning process; a process that moved from extremely technical and bureaucratic procedures to a debate of spatial justice.

16Professionals and new residents appreciated the trendy industrial feeling of South of Market, very close to the financial district, to shops at Union Square, and to convention facilities and entertainment at Yerba Buena Center. High-tech engineers from Silicon Valley also realized that they could move to San Francisco without spending more in housing but with more access to better restaurants and night life. Live/work units, originally intended for artists, were very appealing to the new generation of professionals seeking an alternative to suburban housing.

17The Eastern Neighborhoods experienced a major political turmoil as these incoming young professionals and new development displaced many families, small businesses, and artists. A major dance performance blocked the street to complain about the displacement of a dance studio by a new upscale housing project. Community organizers demonstrated in front of a landlord’s business who evicted a Latino family. Community activists marched within the planning department offices with drums and whistles until they got arrested. Hundreds of residents and workers arrived to a community meeting with municipal authorities. Huge billboards appeared over night mocking the arrogant attitude of the new wealthy residents in the neighborhood. Youth threw eggs at SUVs, slashed tires of luxury cars, and inscribed “yuppies go home” in colorful graffiti. A strong coalition of residents, workers, artists, and community organizers came together and challenge the strong pressures of displacement. This is how the community planning process of the Eastern neighborhoods began.

18While slow and limited, in 2002 the City government responded to the political outburst with the Eastern Neighborhoods community planning process that promised a rezoning of the area and the development of community plans. The City had already started a rezoning effort in 1997, but it was unable to create a viable proposal that could be adopted in a very tense political climate at that time. The community planning process covered almost a quarter of the total land in the city and served multiple purposes.

19The formal City planning process was shaped by multiple dominant visions that drove the development process and defined the conditions of justice. These visions provide an understanding of the social and economic expectations of the dominant stakeholders in the city. Some of them were formally adopted within the government planning process, while others were more quietly enacted through benign policies and private investments.

A vision of highest and best use

20The concept of highest and best use comes from real estate appraisals but has been adopted by planning practices, as the urban planning field increased its concern with profit maximizing. This vision focuses on economic growth rather than social justice. Still, when confronted with the issue of justice, proponents of this vision argue that a growth of resources can benefit the city as a whole including the most economically disadvantage population.

21While in the 1980s office use was considered the highest and best use for San Francisco, the late 1990s and 2000s were centered on housing. The construction of housing in industrial land and inner city neighborhoods was delivering the highest levels of profit, as the demand for city living increased. This argument was also substantiated as a response to the housing “crisis” in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and California. Profit and productivity was supporting the provision of housing for a growing population, which was primarily a middle and upper income group. The housing crisis became a popular framework to justify the production of any type of housing buildings and displacement of any tenants. In addition, regional authorities pursued jobs-housing balance, meaning the ability of each city to house all its workers, as a solution to the increasing transportation problems in the region. As a result many industrial buildings were demolished to build housing projects under the rationality that the retention of a few jobs could not compete with the opportunity of housing several households. This is a clear vision of developers and property owners; their job is to generate profit and maximize the economic value of land in the very short term.

22This vision leads to a process of gentrification in which upscale housing and entertainment assumes a priority over industrial businesses, art studios, or low-income housing. While many city officials acknowledged the contributions of existing activities, they joined developers and new residents to argue that industrial businesses needed to be relocated outside of the city because they were using very expensive land that could be dedicated to lofts or high-rise buildings, as the highest and best uses.

A vision of a creative city

23The vision of a creative city and creative class, as proposed by Richard Florida14 and Charles Landry15, emphasized the role of innovation and creativity as engines of economic growth in cities today, particularly in relationship to a middle and upper professional class and their consumption demands. This became a very popular strategy across cities of all sizes and across the world. San Francisco was considered by these and other scholars as a city of much creativity. Most government authorities and residents agreed with the innovative and artistic qualities of the city and were willing to support them, at least some of them. Along those lines, City legislation and special initiatives were developed on biotechnology, green industries, arts promotion, and tourism. The multimedia industry in San Francisco was an exemplary case of innovation emerging on the urban edges and significantly contributing to the high technology and informational economy. While San Francisco never embraced this vision officially, the City paid close attention to the desires of the professional workforce in the region and the international elite to move to the city. This was another vision where the concept of justice was not addressed. The central focus was on consumption of urban entertainment by a wealthy population. However, in some cases, conditions of justice were framed by the tensions between traditional professional activities and emerging industries and arts.

A vision of smart growth

24The “smart growth” vision was probably one of the most popular approaches explicitly adopted by the municipal planning process and the one embraced by multiple constituencies. This vision suggests concentration of housing in city centers to make better use of existing infrastructure, support public transportation rather than automobile use, and sustainable development16.

25The beautification of the city and the re-crafting of neighborhoods for the new residents were strongly supported with master plans, policies, and a robust budget. The “smart growth” approach was contrary to the clean slate style of previous redevelopment efforts. “Smart growth” initiatives in San Francisco included the construction of small pockets of housing in close proximity to cafes, bookstores, antique furniture stores, and upscale restaurants. One of the most important planning initiatives was the Better Neighborhoods program, launched in 2000 with a couple of million dollars for consultant services. Later in 2005, the Better Streets program, a street improvement program with an initial budget of 27 million dollars, was one of the most important mayor’s efforts to make the streets nicer and greener. These were truly exemplary planning efforts breaking new ground in terms of urban design, public transit, and high density housing. It took much effort to adopt new concepts, which required less automobile use. At the same time, these efforts illustrate the emphasis of the physical planning approach, neglecting the social and economic dimensions. The Better Neighborhoods efforts catered primarily to an upper-middle class, and in some cases at the expense of the working class population and small businesses. As one Filipino resident stated, “I am too brown for the greens.” The smart growth vision was the most prominent vision adopted by the City and translated into a wealth of resources for plans and projects in contrast with the lack of funding for the Eastern Neighborhoods.

A vision of a global city

26Since the last quarter of the last century, the idea of a global city has been discussed by many scholars as a place of advanced technology, information and knowledge production, and high connectivity with other places17. In the global urban hierarchy, San Francisco has never been at the top with New York, Tokyo, or London; its size, its economy, its cultural events, and its resources have always been of a much smaller scale. Still, San Francisco has always had an intense international engagement through selected professional services, tourism, and has been a major gateway for recent immigrants working in the service sector. Some City efforts have supported new industrial strategies but most resources were invested in entertainment and cultural facilities such as the stadium, convention facilities, and historic buildings, among others. Luxury apartments for short-term city visits were also another major element of attraction for international visitors. The vision of a global city was embraced by developers, businesses and city officials in its technological and industrial dimensions, but it was most successful advancing San Francisco’s role as a major hub of consumption for a global professional elite. An alternative global city was also developed on the opposite side of the class spectrum. Low-income immigrants, artists, and small businesses have rapidly expanded their mobility of money, goods, and people as well as created dense networks of cultural and knowledge exchange. A comprehensive approach to the global city vision provides a useful platform to explore negotiation of spatial justice by multiple mobile actors.

A vision of urban retro

27While the smart growth vision was the most explicitly embraced in the planning process of the city, the urban retro vision proposed by Michael Johns18 had probably a stronger presence but it was never adopted in the official planning or local government language. Michael Johns argued that cities are experiencing a trend of urban retro, “a growing nostalgia for the tradition and excitement of urban life” and an “attempt to instill history and authenticity into the city’s streets, buildings, and neighborhoods.” And no other city displays a better urban retro effort than San Francisco. Thus, for Michael Johns, new residents and planners want to recreate a city that existed in other times with old fashioned lamps, vintage trolleys, industrial brick facades, but without the continuity and identity of the real neighborhoods from the 50s. In the urban retro gentrified neighborhoods 90 percent of the people are white and most of them highly educated; they lack the diversity that new residents claim to like about the city. “For real diversity in these neighborhoods, you have to look to the dogs. These neighborhoods tend to have more types of dogs than classes of people.” remarks Johns.

28Under this vision of urban retro, we could argue that the task of planners becomes the proper crafting of images undisturbed by the complexities of urban space and spatial justice. New residents want the industrial charm but without the sounds of auto repair shops or band rehearsal studios, the smells of breweries or sausage factories, or movements of trucks. Sitting on a sidewalk café cannot be spoiled by the presence of homeless or repair shops’fumes. A loft in a renovated industrial building retains the brick walls and high ceilings but with completely remodeled plumbing, new bathroom and kitchen fixtures, and only quiet residential neighbors. Now, these are not just images or empty forms, the goal is to make the city look old, but with the peace and quiet of a suburb. Michael Johns argues that those forms are animated by a suburban culture that is expanding in San Francisco:

... a stage-set assembled from miscellaneous pieces of the past and from new pieces made to look like they are from the past. [U] rban retro tries to look old while being new, strives for urbanity in suburban ways, wants authenticity in novel settings, and yearns for diversity and uniqueness in relatively homogeneous communities replicated in city after city.

29The development priorities focused on economic growth, natural and built environment, and upscale consumption led to visions of the city detached from social disparities and justice. In contrast, the global city and urban retro visions, focused on international mobility and historical references, have acknowledged the economic disparities and social and political challenges in the construction of a just city.

30These visions were overlapping and clashing given the political differences across local government agencies. By 2000, San Franciscans had elected a progressive Board of Supervisors that counterbalanced the prodevelopers approach of Mayor Willie Brown. At the very broad level, the Board of Supervisors was more concerned with social issues and needs and the mayor’s office was more concerned with the construction of new projects. Political differences were also embedded within City agencies; the Planning Department had an administration predominantly concerned with approval of projects and responsible for securing good and stable relationships between developers and the mayor’s office while many mid-level planners were concerned with issues of displacement and developed close relationships with community organizations. The Board of Supervisors was very engaged in the tensions of the Eastern Neighborhoods development process and placed political pessure to support this effort. However, they had limited control over allocation of resources. The mayor and the Planning Department administration allocated very limited resources to this effort; a few planners were assigned but without a budget for consultants or production. Thus, the political and economic tensions within the City were an additional constraint to the narrow planning process mostly concerned with the physical qualities of the city.

31The economic recession of 2000 minimized the sprawling of chaos and social tensions, since construction and investments had slowed down. But, in spite of the recession, and as the city recovered from it, development continued to be guided by a few fragmented pieces of legislation. By the end of 2008, after much displacement of neighborhood fragmentation, the City approved the community plans. It remains to be seen the impact of their implementation.

32Community leaders led intense and sophisticated grassroots organizing to push the planning process towards a broader exchange of social concerns. In addition, careful coordination between community organizers and midlevel planners allowed the insertion of some of those social concerns into the planning process. Community organizations, mid-level city planners, and Members of the City’s Board of Supervisors inserted a socio-economic study and a public benefit zoning proposal into the planning effort. The socio-economic study addressed social and economic impacts of recent investments and was inserted in the environmental review process, the strongest legal tool in the entire planning process. The public benefit zoning proposal addressed redistribution of profit in the community and was inserted in the rezoning efforts and plans throughout the city, beyond the Eastern Neighborhoods. These efforts were outside of San Francisco’s traditional planning process.

33The developers, small and large, also engaged in alternative negotiations. Thus, the battle was shifting from demonstrations on the streets and hearings at City Hall to direct negotiations among city officials, community representatives, and developers that took the development process beyond the boundaries of the formal planning process.

Encountering invisibilities among the visions

34The City of San Francisco regulates the use of plastic or metal forks at restaurants, it creates public patios inside and on top of buildings that can only be accessed by those able to recognize a cryptic sign, it designs public benches that prevent homeless people from resting and sleeping there, it prohibits additional units for family in-laws but allows them for servants. The complex rules that regulate the production of space in San Francisco (through more than ten pounds of zoning codes) had been created to address specific goals, such as limit the number of fast food outlets, provide some open space for office workers, eliminate the homeless population, or accommodate wealthy families. They have addressed specific cultural and social relations, but they have been hidden. Thus, the planning practices can be elaborated in their specific social goals but they were framed by a rigid professional language, narrow understanding of urban vitality, and limited considerations of conditions of justice.

35Once I had a conversation with a high official at the Planning Department about the emphasis on physical structures as a way to hide the social dimension of development. His response clearly conveyed the constraints of the planning practice today. He said “I can predict how many cars will cross the street in front of the project, but I cannot predict the color of people19 ”. How can the City ignore the fact that a new project with apartment’s prices ranging from $ 650,000 to 12 million, and up to 70 percent pieds à terre, will very likely be occupied primarily by a wealthy white population? The people that can access these pieds à terre properties have a very well defined profile in terms of income, ethnicity, and job. It represents 5 percent of the existing population in San Francisco. This was street knowledge, but this knowledge was not part of the transportation and environmental review models20. This was not part of the planning process. Here, we encounter an explicit structural constrain in the definition of space in which spatial practices, common knowledge, and everyday life experiences are excluded from the planning process. The idea of a just city was not part of the planning inquiry or planning process.

36In 2004, I attended an environmental review meeting in which a group of Latino residents came to talk to the planners about the rats in their homes, the lack of space for kids to play, and the limited access to health services. These planners could not understand much of what these people were saying, in spite of the simultaneous translation from Spanish to English. Because most of their interactions are with consultants, planners could read regression models, vehicle counts, or read zoning legislation, but cannot connect the quality of the environment to the living conditions of these people.

37Granted, we could argue that the environmental review process in San Francisco has become a monster: the strongest legal mandate turn into a very expensive and time consuming process that produces no insightful knowledge or any better understanding of the development process across parties. But even if we look at one of the highest profile plans, The Market and Octavia Better Neighborhood Plan, we can see the absence of people and social dimensions. This plan received much financial and political support from the City and various constituencies. It exemplifies how the city embraced the smart growth vision as a new way of guiding development and housing production. Most of the 200 pages were dedicated to the design of buildings, streets, and landscapes. Only 11 pages were dedicated to the housing section, which was the closest section to any social or economic reference but without any mention of current or new residents. The text below illustrates how the benefits of development were addressed in terms of physical shapes: scales, density, and fine-grained fabric. Furthermore, it explicitly “defers” any issue of affordability or homelessness to the larger city structure.

This plan encourages housing as a beneficial form of infill development-new buildings at traditional scales and densities, reflecting the fine-grained fabric of the place. In many respects, this plan does not diverge from established and continually evolving citywide policies and programs of housing affordability. It does not establish new inclusionary standards, new funding mechanisms, nor create its own solutions to homelessness in the city. On these matters, which cannot be affected on an area-by-area basis, the plan defers to the larger citywide structure21.

38By fragmenting the tasks and geography, the City was producing more isolated, quasi suburban enclaves rather than contributing to the conditions of social justice, to the rich cultural and social fabric of the city, or to the production of urban vitality. This is not to portray an evil or unprofessional profile of planners in San Francisco. They are very smart and caring; they carried progressive politics credentials, and are socially sensitive. They are also very knowledgeable; they come from the best planning schools in the country. They prepare comprehensive plans and compile housing and economic data to inform plans and policies. They develop many transportation models to predict congestion and parking and 3-D simulation models. They go into infinite details in the production of many pounds of zoning regulations to determine if a restaurant can use a tablecloth or not. Plans include very sophisticated urban design guidelines, which defined the perfect sidewalk and bench widths, innovative shapes for urban parks, precise proportions for slender high-rise towers, or intricate building shapes to maximize sunlight. All of these elements have dramatically enhanced the quality of city life. But for whom?

39How can planners define their job as the regulation of land and physical planning detached from their social and economic dimension22? Why do planners avoid the social dimension of the city? I argue that this invisibility of the social realities of the Eastern Neighborhoods explain the constraints of the planning process. The social dimension was invisible and hidden but not absent.

40Some of these invisibilities were skillfully addressed by one of the community initiatives, the Mission Anti-displacement Coalition (MAC), which managed to align very diverse community organizations “to stop the displacement of working class people in the Mission District and San Francisco23.” They directly addressed conditions of justice through the People’s Plan, which focused on two main strategies: “democratizing the planning process and challenging inappropriate development projects in the Mission District24.” While MAC gathered multiple community and art organizations, the core organizational members included St. Peter’s Housing Committee, People Organizing to Defend Economic and Environmental Rights (PODER), Mission Economic Development Association (MEDA), Central American Resource Network (CARECEN), and Dolores Street Community Services (DSCS). These organizations relied on their own funding coming from public and private sources.

41MAC was able to bring to the table the social construction of space and its networks. MAC’s activities ranged from demonstrations on the streets to a grassroots educational program on land use, to an international conference. They recognized that demonstrating to fight evictions was acting too late in the development process and decided to engage with the planning process in the definition of land uses. Bringing families, workers, and recent immigrants to participate in the planning process was not an easy task, given the technicality of the language which was barely understood even by planning professionals, but they were successful. Eric Quezada, the leader of MAC, was ready to act on the immediate needs of the community, finding a bed for a homeless person or requesting a loan from the Mayor’s office, but only because these actions were connected to a broader and future social change25. This connection between present actions and future vision were much weaker among planning professionals. While planners were reading and attending local conferences to revise the zoning codes, MAC activists were traveling to Latin America to train affordable housing government agencies and having international dialogues at the Global Social Forum. MAC representatives not only had a direct engagement in the production of space in its social dimensions and fluid international networks, they also had a much broader perspective on development and planning practices.

42MAC’s direct engagement to shape the planning process was imbued with much tension even when city agencies were eager and open to develop a joined effort. Exchanges between the planning department and community organizations were very tense and it took time and effort to open discussions. Planners were yelled to go home and accused of pushing the African-American community out of the city at the multiple initial meetings in the Eastern Neighborhoods community planning efforts. Still, the level of interaction between planners and marginal communities matured and became sophisticated at times. Low-budget restaurants provided food for the City workshops because the City had not allocated any resources. Community activists brought and trained in advanced more than 300 participants to City workshops, ran small bilingual workshops for immigrants, built leadership among youth, and crafted sophisticated strategies to negotiate with government officials. Planners stayed past midnight cleaning the rooms used for the community workshops, way beyond their duties. Some planners were even informed in advance about the political demonstrations and takeovers of City buildings organized by community activists. The combination of grassroots mobilization, engagement with planning professionals and local officials, and community leadership for social change pushed the planning process to address conditions of spatial justice in the Eastern Neighborhoods.

Production of spatial capital and conditions of spatial justice

43Urban development policies include some people, some activities, and some networks and exclude others. In San Francisco, most planning resources and much of the new development were catered to a professional, high-income, primarily white population. (High-rise residential development in Rincon Hill and Transbay area, infill “smart growth” development in Market-Octavia Better Neighborhood, live-work buildings throughout the Eastern Neighborhoods, etc.) Cities are constantly changing and the City of San Francisco might be purposefully pursuing a vision of the city of upscale residential buildings and entertainment, at the expense of low-income housing and small shops and industries. It might be pursuing a shift from an urban to a suburban culture; from a diversified place of production to a homogeneous place of consumption. The high-rise residential towers illustrate the suburban trends in San Francisco. These towers house their own gyms, SUV parking, and grocery stores. People can use valet parking to go to theaters and restaurants without the inconvenience of ever walking on the streets. People can look at the city’s skyline from their windows; get to the baseball game in a few minutes; or access a wide range of food while enjoying the privacy and comfort of their homes.

44If the City were to pursue this vision, then, the planning process might be required to minimize or make invisible those people, activities, and places that are outside of this vision. But, here I argue that this vision presents some inherent contradictions because the City might be dismantling the urban vitality of the inner city that the new residents were pursuing. The City might be losing the vitality that made San Francisco very attractive in the first place. The City might be undermining the spatial capital of the inner city. We could also approach the construction of this suburban-like space as a work in progress; we could acknowledge the efforts by new residents and planners to align those physical elements with a new suburban sensibility in the city, a major development trend identified by Johns. New residents might be creating a new spatial capital of their own, but as Johns suggests, quoting Henry James, this could be a process that takes “…an endless amount of history.” The urban retro vision highlights a development approach with an emphasis on the development of physical elements without much history or social meaning behind, except for a feeling of nostalgia. This vision highlights the absence of spatial capital in the several recently refurbished urban retro neighborhoods. The physical elements such as signs, brick walls, and vintage lamps are disconnected from their original activities and networks that made the spatial capital of the 1950s. I find Michael Johns’studies26 of the city glamour of the 1950s extremely elaborate in its empirical and analytical constructs and very insightful to inform the recent development trends in San Francisco. However, I propose that we do not have to time-travel as far back as the 1950s to observe fine urban qualities; we can find those in the inner city neighborhoods of San Francisco today. We can recognize the value of the margins, the spatial capital of the margins that has become so attractive to presumably bored suburbanites. Johns and many others assumed that after the 1950s “cities fell into a long period of physical and cultural decay. [and that renewal projects failed to improve them].” I argue that this is a well defined but narrow bourgeois perspective. If we were to look carefully we would realize that while renewal projects failed and while developers and planners were mostly concerned with office towers and suburban housing, much was happening in the inner cities during the second half of the 20^th century. We do not have to go the 1950s to encounter neighborhoods in which the community can get together and build a park for children to play, to walk to the corner taqueria and have a beer and tacos with a few friends, or to go to a house turned into a cultural center for local musicians and poets. This is the spatial capital that the inner city has been quietly producing while everybody else has been concerned with other higher profile places. These were the conditions of spatial justice produced at the margins of major urban development trends. The spatial capital is produced by urban actors when their activities and their networks intensify the coherent use of the physical setting. I propose the concept of spatial capital to recognize the production of urban vitality by marginal actors and their negotiation of spatial justice.

45The city has been struggling to redefine its conditions of urbanity. Industrial changes, construction investments, consumption patterns and demographic trends placed the spotlight of development on the Eastern Neighborhoods, their spatial capital and attractiveness to other populations. At the same time this spotlight challenged the production and reproduction of this spatial capital, as newcomers, developers and city officials ignored the conditions of production.

46The City was ill equipped to engage in the development and planning process of the Eastern Neighborhoods. More specifically, planners did not know how to engage with the spatial qualities of the inner city neighborhoods. They played with designs, forms, and images detached from their social dimensions and tensions. And, even when they attempted to explore the social complexities in an interaction with marginal communities the planning process was very limited and fragmented at best. The limited engagement of the City in the production of spatial capital led to a polarized situation in which two competing visions driven by the major stakeholders were constantly in tension; one that pursued an ethnically and economically diverse working class place and the other that pursued an upscale residential place with entertainment.

47The diverse urban actors in the Eastern Neighborhoods, immigrants, workers, artists, and small businesses, produced a major spatial capital: streets and public places of intense economic, social, and cultural activities in which social tensions were openly addressed and international exchanges were expanded and deepened. However the arrival of wealthier newcomers was undermining the production of this spatial capital, intentionally and unintentionally. Facing these spatial tensions, the City was unable to articulate a development and planning process to address the conditions of spatial justice. This failure was rooted in a narrow vision of space framed by the shapes and forms of physical objects detached or hidden from its social relations and tensions and from its expanding international networks. Not that the spatial capital or the conditions of spatial justice will easily disappear even if the City wanted to dismantle it. In spite of the strong wave of displacement, much of the spatial capital, many Latino and Filipino families, shops and studios, taquerias and pho houses remained in the city by 2008. The resilience and organization of these diverse Eastern Neighborhoods actors complicate the development process of San Francisco; the land was not empty for new construction.

48The challenges of development trends in central cities like San Francisco in the 21^st century demand a serious revision of the planning practice in which an understanding of the production of spatial capital in its physical, social and networks dimensions is acknowledged and in which the conditions of spatial justice are reconsidered by local governments. Without these spatial considerations planners and local governments become irrelevant in the development process.