Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
0016-7185/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.02.009
An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia
Alec Brownlow
Department of Geography, DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60614, United States
Received 5 March 2004; received in revised form 29 December 2004
Abstract
This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human–environment relations and processes of environmental
change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control
mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last
several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound
socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made
during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately
by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have
resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this
context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control than one of environmental concern.
 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Environmental change; Social control; Fear; Gender; Race
1. Introduction
It is well established in sociological, criminological,
and geographical thought that social control plays a fundamental
role in shaping urban experience. Theories of
social control have a rich history towards our explanation
of urban society, urban form and function; indeed,
it is considered by many to be the foundational principle
of urban sociological thought and analysis (e.g., Janowitz,
1975; Gibbs, 1989). Social control was the cornerstone
of urban ecological thought developed by the
Chicago School and most demonstratively applied in
Park’s and Burgess’s The City (1970) where it was called
upon to explain everything from neighborhood and
community structure to patterns of criminal behavior
and delinquency (see also, McKenzie, 1923; Shaw and
McKay, 1942). Later, in her analysis of urban dysfunction
and decay, Jacobs (1961) emphasized everyday
forms of social control as a priori to urban viability, a
mechanisms of social and spatial regulation whose diversity
and health were central to the livable and accessible
city. Since Jacobs, however, ecological accolades and
theories of social control (inter alia) have fallen into disfavor
and have been roundly and legitimately criticized
for their failure to account for the disproportional inXuences
of structural power in shaping social control’s
form, function, distribution, and implementation. Faced
with the pervasiveness and apparent rigidity of uneven
development and segregation in the urban US, subsequent
scholarship on the topic has reconceptualized
urban social control as an authoritative project of social
and political hegemony involving any number of regulatory
and reproductive spatial practices and institutions
(Harvey, 1973; Wilson, 1987; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey
and Denton, 1993). Today, a growing chorus of urban
theorists continues to expose and call our attention to
the often brutal, increasingly quixotic and Orwellian
methods and technologies deployed to police social
interaction and secure spatial meaning in the post-Fordist,E-mail address: alecb@temple.edu
228 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
entrepreneurial city (Davis, 1990; Smith, 1996, 1998;
Zukin, 1995, Flusty, 2001; MacLeod, 2002; Mitchell,
2003; see also Harvey, 1989).
However, in its fervor to reveal the ideological and
spatial injustices of Wn de siecle capitalism, recent critique
has, at best, been ambivalent to alternative readings
and interpretations of the social control debate
(see Atkinson, 2003)—that is, to the capacities for exclusion,
brutality, and violence that often accompany the
absence (either real or perceived) of social and spatial
control mechanisms, especially among the city’s most
marginalized populations. For example, the patterns
and high rates of violent crime found in inner city black
neighborhoods are widely and increasingly attributed to
the decline of or the neglect by institutions of control,
both formal and informal, that accompany racial spatial
segregation, impoverishment, and poverty concentration
(Blau and Golden, 1986; Sampson and Groves,
1989; Anderson, 1999; Peterson and Krivo, 1999;
Rosenfeld et al., 2001). Similarly, a perceived absence of
control is central to the ever-growing fear of violent victimization
among urban women, especially the fear of
male sexual attack in public spaces (Warr, 1985; Valentine,
1989; Pain, 1991, 1997; Stanko, 1995; Sparks et al.,
2001). Among the latter, the result is a persistent and
pervasive sense of public vulnerability, a constant
accounting of the surrounding environment for cues of
possible danger or disorder, and exclusion from or
restricted or conditional access to those public spaces,
resources, and activities perceived to be of possible risk
(Valentine, 1989; Gardner, 1990; Day, 1999a,b; Koskela
and Pain, 2000). To this end, these examples suggest that
uncontrolled urban space results in patterns of exclusion
and denied opportunities for public participation that
are every bit as pernicious and un-democratic as the
entrepreneurial and revanchist practices, policies, and
discourses decried by Smith (1996, 1998), Mitchell
(2003) and others. Further, the uneven implications for
spatial use and meaning among marginalized social
groups, not least the safety and inclusion of women and
blacks (and, especially, black women) in the urban public
sphere, suggest similar regulative ideological inXuences
and histories.
In this paper, I explore how social control, or the lack
thereof, inXuences and shapes human–environment relations
in the city. My starting point is the general overlap
of public and ecological geographies that constitute
urban parks and greenspaces, and the implications of
social and spatial control towards their social and ecological
viability, function, and meaning. I demonstrate
how access to these public urban environments is, for
many, contingent upon a healthy and diverse control
network. I argue that the absence or decline of control
has profound implications for how public ecological
space is used, perceived, and accessed; moreover, I demonstrate
how the removal or collapse of control translates
into material changes in the physical landscape
that, Wrst, signify and are interpreted locally as the result
of uneven power relations and a culture of neglect and,
second, reproduce patterns of exclusion among marginalized
populations. To this end, I demonstrate how
urban ecologies are politically inscribed and manipulated
in a manner that reXects and reproduces social
relations of power and inequality.
More precisely, the paper explores how structural racism
and racist decision-making, both past and present,
both black and white, combine to produce dangerous
spaces and landscape level changes that inXuence
human–environment relations and environmental conditions
in Philadelphia today. On the one hand, it is an historical
account of social control in that city, including its
forms, its functions, its interpretations, its political
meaning, and its local collapse during an especially ugly
period in Philadelphia’s racial history. On the other
hand, it is a contemporary account of the social and
environmental implications that are the legacy of this
violent and volatile past.
The paper is structured as follows. First, I discuss the
theoretical framework upon which my argument is
assembled. I draw from a variety of social and ecological
theories and perspectives that, combined, are necessary
to problematize, investigate, and explain the social and
ecological complexities that inXuence “everyday” urban
ecologies in the US today. To this end, the paper draws
from and attempts to build upon a nascent urban political
ecology that explores how power is materialized, represented,
and interpreted in urban environments (e.g.,
Katz and Kirby, 1991; Kipfer et al., 1996; Keil and
Graham, 1998; Gandy, 2002; Keil and Desfor, 2003;
Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003).
Next, using Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System
and the West Philadelphia community of Cobbs Creek
as my case study, I discuss the social and political signiWcance
of public parks to that neighborhood’s expanding
and increasingly segregated black population in the
1950s and 1960s; I introduce the local network of social
control mechanisms (formal and informal; de jure and
de facto) and discuss their signiWcance towards facilitating
popular use of and access to these public spaces.
Next, I discuss the collapse of these socio-spatial and
socio-ecological relationships during a particularly volatile
period of racial hostility in the 1970s, when the network
of local social control mechanisms dissipated, or
were dismantled and redistributed in response to the
racial violence that gripped both the city and the community
at that time. Finally, I explore the social and ecological
implications that resulted from this collapse of
the control network, the economic and political impotence
and ambivalence of the city and park commission
to account for and rectify these changes, and their disproportional
impact upon local patterns of public space
access and human–environment relations today.
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 229
In short, I argue that current patterns of ecological
change, spatial exclusion and fractured human–environment
relations in Cobbs Creek today are, in large part,
the legacy of an overtly racist and racially explosive
period in Philadelphia’s political history; one in which
both the city’s governing, white elite and local black
activists play signiWcant, if disproportionate, roles.
Today, the results of this legacy combine with severe and
pervasive conditions of racial segregation, impoverishment,
economic isolation, and the constant, if growing,
threat of male sexual violence to further alienate local
residents, especially women, from adjacent urban ecologies
and the social and political beneWts of public partic-
ipation.
2. Urban political ecology and the nature of public space
Urban nature is replete with social meaning. It reXects
and signiWes a host of power relations, both historical
and contemporary, insofar as its distribution, form,
function, general condition, and terms of access are the
products of the political and social struggles that constitute
urbanization, generally. Accordingly, urban nature
is a “microcosm of wider tensions in urban society”
(Gandy, 2002, p. 2) whose production is implicated in
the production and reproduction of urban social relations
(Katz and Kirby, 1991). Popular arguments critique
the discursive and ideological signiWcance of urban
nature, both historically (Rosenzweig and Blackmar,
1992; Spirn, 1996; Taylor, 1999) and in more contemporary
analyses of nature’s reemergence in Wn de siecle
urban discourse, where it is often couched within the
languages of urban sustainability, competitiveness, or
renewal (Keil and Graham, 1998; Cowell and Thomas,
2002; Whitehead, 2003; While et al., 2004).
Beyond the discursive, however, are material landscapes
whose physical conditions are similarly inscribed
with the histories of urban social relations and power.
The politics of urban ecology are identiWable in everything
from greenspace provision (e.g., Koehler and
Wrightson, 1987; Wolch et al., 2002; Pincetl, 2003) to the
material diVerences and environmental conditions that
often attend these uneven distributions. The latter,
according to Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003), goes to
the heart of an emerging urban political ecology whose
principle aim is to “expose the [political and ecological]
processes that bring about highly uneven urban environments”
(906). To this end, recent analyses correlating
ecological diVerences and distinctions with social dimensions
and spatial patterns of uneven development are
foundational to a growing awareness of urban ecological
injustice, whereby the relative “health” (normatively
deWned) of local ecologies and ecosystems is indicative of
larger patterns of social inequality and marginality. For
example, Heynen’s (2003) study of the politics of uneven
patterns of forest health and diversity in Indianapolis,
Grove’s (1996) thesis on the socioeconomic ecologies in
Baltimore, Robbins’ and colleague’s (2001, 2003) analyses
of the geographies and risks of lawn ecologies in
Columbus, Ohio, and Davis’s (1998) brilliant deconstruction
of Southern California’s politico-ecological
landscape succeed in demonstrating the permeation of
power into the very physicality of everyday urban ecological
patterns and processes. I argue below that Philadelphia’s
urban ecologies and ecological geographies
have similarly been shaped by dynamics and histories of
power.
Political ecology, however, moves beyond identifying
and explaining the processes and patterns of uneven
environments to demonstrate and explain (a) how social
relations of power are reproduced through uneven ecologies
insofar as the latter shape and condition patterns
of and capacities for resource access; (b) the political factors
and implications involved in ecological transformations;
and (c) how patterns of environmental change and
patterns of resource access are related (Robbins, 2004).
Questions of access permeate “traditional” Third World
political ecology; they are central to explorations and
analyses of the discourses, institutions, and social relations
that govern and that are reproduced through
regimes of resource ownership, distribution, tenure, and
control (Peet and Watts, 1996; Rocheleau et al., 1996;
Bryant and Bailey, 1997). To this end, access to or control
over resources is a function of power and is contingent
upon the reproduction of discourses, institutions,
and social relations residing at a variety of spatial scales
and social spheres, invoking dynamics of gender (Schroeder,
1993; Carney, 1993; Rocheleau et al., 1996), race
(Miller et al., 1996), ethnicity, age, and class.
I argue that it is this relationship between power, control,
and access that most clearly and convincingly links
political ecology with urban social geography; where the
rubber hits the road, the dynamics that govern access to
timber and rural ecologies in Nepal or Southeast Asia
parallel the processes that regulate access to parks and
urban ecologies in Los Angeles or Philadelphia insofar
as both are regulated by and reXect historical relationships
of power existing along a variety of social, economic,
and political axes and scales. The fact, however,
that urban ecologies are often synonymous with public
space and all that that term infers to the social and political
life of the city (see Goheen, 1998) suggests that quite
diVerent stakes are at hand when political, social, and
ecological processes coalesce in a manner that denies or
corrupts the terms, or the rights, of access; in the city,
exclusion from public space is not so much an issue of
economic livelihood (although it very well could be) as it
is a political and moral issue involving the rights of citizenship
that accompany civic and public participation
(Staehli and Thompson, 1997; Mitchell, 2003). This
right, I argue, is for too many (especially women and
230 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
minorities) a function of fear and the conditions and
contingencies that govern spatial and social control (see
Burgess et al., 1988; Valentine, 1989; West, 1989; Feagin,
1991; Burgess, 1998). The corruption or absence of these
‘rights to the city’ (Mitchell, 2003) can often be discerned
from the general physical condition of public spaces and
ecologies themselves, whereby decline, decay, and fear
are often the product of politico-spatial neglect and
social marginality.
In the remainder of this paper I explore the relationship
between changing urban ecologies and changing
patterns of control and resource access, and how these
dialectical processes and patterns combine to produce
landscapes of power and exclusion in a West Philadelphia
community.
3. Methods
Narratives provided by Cobbs Creek residents, Philadelphia
government and Park oYcials are used throughout
the paper as a means of drawing attention to the
discursive and political signiWcance attached to the
events culminating in the social and environmental
changes in Fairmount and Cobbs Creek Parks. They
were gathered in focus groups and interviews between
the summer of 2000 and the fall of 2001. Residents of
Cobbs Creek participated in several focus groups that
varied in size from 6 to 12 participants. Both men and
women participated in adult focus groups moderated by
the author. Young men and women in their teens participated
in single-sex focus groups moderated by a samesex
African American instructor with whom they were
familiar.1
Interviews and focus groups were loosely
structured, using open-ended questions and conversation
techniques so as to facilitate discussion and draw
forth oral histories and narratives of Philadelphia life
over the past several decades. All interviews and focus
groups were attended, recorded, and transcribed by the
author. Age and, where necessary, gender are provided
for Cobbs Creek residents only, so as to provide historical
and positioned context to their perspectives and nar-
ratives.
4. Cobbs Creek
4.1. The community
Cobbs Creek, with a population of roughly 15,000, is
the largest neighborhood in West Philadelphia (Fig. 1).
Beginning in the 1950s, the largely (99%) white neighborhood
was “opened” to black settlement. Middle class
families, eager to escape the burgeoning and increasingly
violent ghettos of North and South Philadelphia and
raise their children in a safe community, began arriving
immediately. Over the next 20 years, black in-migration
and white Xight would combine to produce a majority
(96%) black population by 1970, a demographic that it
retains to this day.
Early in its black history, Cobbs Creek was among
the most progressive and politically active black neighborhoods
in the country. It was home to personalities
like Wilt Chamberlain, Johnny Sample, and Paul Robeson,
and from it emerged a political structure and tradition
of civic activism that made it among the most
powerful black Democratic neighborhoods in the city.
Hardy Williams (male, early 70s) was (and remains)
among its most powerful early leaders.2
A most unusual group of people. The Cobbs Creek
community became identiWably the forerunner of a
lot of models citywide. I mean, not citywide but
nationwide! (Author: In terms of what?) In terms
of its ability to deWne the issues that impacted on
that community – and other communities – and
therefore provide a model of how to eVectuate
political empowerment, therefore economic
growth, civic, social, and political participation in
an organized way so as to stem crime, grow other
viable oVshoots ƒ So, it was a laboratory, historical
and exciting, that gave to the rest of this city the
participation of the black people in the most
important way. And that is, politically they grew
up into an independent, political movement that
was based on participatory, community stuV;
where the folks felt the obligation to organize.
By the late 1960s, declining economic and political
conditions locally, combined with one of the highest and
most intense degrees of racial segregation in the nation,
provided the impetus for the emergence of both street
gangs and radical black political activism. During this
period, groups like the Black Panthers and, later, MOVE
would come to represent, if only symbolically, Cobbs
Creek’s black political proWle—a more radical political
form of the kind described by Senator Williams above.
The racial violence and unrest of this period in Cobbs
Creek’s and Philadelphia’s history would change local
human–environment relations forever.
Since the rather quick and, in the case of MOVE,
violent demise of radical black political activism in
the 1970s and 1980s, Cobbs Creek has languished and
decades of economic decline, neglect, and racial and
economic segregation have caught up with the neighbor-
1
The teenagers in this study were students in a summer environmental
education program in Cobbs Creek Park. Their course instructors
served as focus group moderators.
2
Senator Hardy Williams served several terms in the Pennsylvania
State Senate where he represented the Cobbs Creek District. Today, his
son Anthony Hardy Williams serves in that position.
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 231
hood.3,4
Today, the Cobbs Creek “condition” is dominated
by social indicators of inequality and neglect: 12%
unemployment; male unemployment near 50% and
closer to 75% among young men between the ages of 16
and 19; the number of families living in poverty (16%) or
headed by a single female (17%) are more than twice that
of white Philadelphia.5
Of particular concern, violent
crime rates are rising rapidly. Rape in Cobbs Creek is
increasing at an average annual percentage rate of 11%,
a pace 1.5 times that of the rest of the City. Further,
while murder in Philadelphia has declined annually by
an average of 6.4% since 1995, murder in Cobbs Creek
has grown at an annual rate of 4.1% during the same
period. Today, the geography of violent crime in Cobbs
Creek is pervasive, encompassing the parks and public
spaces of the neighborhood, including Cobbs Creek
Park where nearly two-dozen men and women, most of
them from the local neighborhood, have been murdered
or discovered dead over the past two decades and where
rape and attack are relatively regular occurrences.6
It
was not always so.
4.2. The park
Cobbs Creek Park (est. 1913) is an 800-acre stretch of
wooded open space following the contours of the neighborhood’s
(and the city’s) western boundary. It is one of
Fig. 1. Cobbs Creek Park and vicinity (map by Jason Davidson, Temple University).
3
Philadelphia, along with other northern cities, continues to be
among the most hypersegregated (Massey and Denton, 1989) cities in
the nation.
4
On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia P.D., with the approval of then
Mayor, Wilson Goode, dropped an incendiary bomb on the home and
headquarters of MOVE, a largely black and politically radical and active
group, on Osage Avenue in Cobbs Creek. The consequent conXagration
killed 11 people and burned down an entire city block, leaving
300 people homeless.
5
1990, 2000 Census data.
6
The two most recent homicide victims were discovered in the park
earlier this year (Summer 2003). Both were women.
232 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
seven watershed parks that comprise the Fairmount
Park System (est. 1855) of Philadelphia (Fig. 2), which,
at 8900 acres or one-tenth of the city’s area, is among the
largest municipal urban park systems in the world.
As the neighborhood’s largest and most prominent
public space, Cobbs Creek Park played a critical role in
the community’s social and political development.
Senator Hardy Williams: [The park] was very nice,
physically, unique and attractive. You had a park
right there. It was just a nice aesthetic thing. Not
myself, but a lot of kids were able to play and interchange
there. You always had the ability to go here
and there and recreate. And there was a sense of
ownership of that piece of earth. It was about aesthetics.
It was continuity.
Harriett (mid 60s): Walks in the park were very much
a part of community life and pleasure, then. I used to
walk with my mother in the park every Sunday after
church. We would sit for long periods of time on the
benches, just watching the world go by. My children
used to visit the park with their grandparents, my
parents. My father would teach them about insects,
my mother would show them the Xowers.
Tony (early 50s): You know, trees, forests, climbing
trees were all a part of being a kid. I had a dog
and all my buddies used to go into the park. Use
the trails. I mean, it was probably more – the recreation
there in the park was not manufactured for
us ƒ We had fun with the natural environment of
the park, you know, doing what you’d do in a
park. Roll in the grass, roll down the hill, take my
dog and Wnd a new trail. You know, discovery
kinds of things ƒ You know, that was a part of
being in the community.
Fig. 2. Fairmount Park System (map by Jason Davidson, Temple University).
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 233
Today, Cobbs Creek Park has become infamous,
renowned more for dysfunction, neglect, and disorder
than for its social and recreational opportunities or its
environmental amenities, with commensurate change in
its signiWcance and meaning to the Cobbs Creek community
and the local imaginary (Latty, 2000). Drug use,
crime, and prostitution are chronic. The stripped, burned
out shells of stolen autos and appliances, regularly augmented
by heaps of illegally dumped construction and
restaurant waste, have become deWning features of the
landscape’s new topography (Fig. 3). Moreover, all of
these activities and perceived disorders are accompanied
and hidden by an emerging ecological structure that is
the product of political neglect and ecological change.
“Weed” based ecologies dominate large areas of the
Cobbs Creek landscape. This is largely a function of: (1)
being surrounded by and perpetually exposed to the
myriad environmental stressors and disturbances of
urbanization—including air, soil, and water pollution,
landscape fragmentation, invasive ecologies from surrounding
residential areas, botanical gardens, and ports,
soil and stream bank erosion, inter alia (McPherson
et al., 1994; Forman, 1998), augmented by (2) a decadesold
culture of Wscal neglect and political ambivalence
that permeates Philadelphia politics (Goldenberg,
1999).
Currently, 35% of the local biotic diversity in Cobbs
Creek is non-native in origin, much of it growing in thick,
mat-like monocultures of kudzu, Japanese knotweed,
Oriental bittersweet, and wisteria (Fig. 4). Among ecologists,
these new ecologies are reviled for their role in the
disappearance of “native” ecosystem types (Mooney and
Hobbs, 2000) and their removal is the primary goal of
restoration ecology policy and discourse (Jordan et al.,
1987; Baldwin et al., 1994). Social scientists and environmental
psychologists, on the other hand, reveal an
entirely diVerent aspect of weedy ecologies—as indicators
of social disorder and a lack of control whose physical
structure triggers fear, suspicion, and subsequent avoidance
among potential landscape users (Fisher and Nasar,
1992; Burgess, 1998; Herzog and Chernick, 2000).
5. Ecology of fear
Beyond their ecological impacts, in Cobbs Creek,
these new ecologies have profound social implications:
their emerging dominance in the landscape has, along
with the pervasive trash, abandoned autos, drug paraphernalia,
graYti, etc., become indicative of disorder and
a perceived absence of social, spatial and, ecological control,
augmenting and amplifying already existing fears of
place among, especially, women (see Schroeder and
Anderson, 1984; Madge, 1997; Burgess, 1998), whose
primary fear concerns the risk of male violence. In
Cobbs Creek, these fears are explicit and justiWed.
Nina (early 30s): It’s getting – like they found the
bodies down in the park in broad daylight. Girls
getting raped. Little girls. It’s sick! ƒ The point is
they Wnding girls’ bodies – raped, dismantled. They
found three girls’ bodies in the park, right down at
the bottom of the hill.
Julia (late 60s): I know you’ve heard about some of
the things that have happened over the last four or
Wve years in the park. There were bodies found.
Fig. 3. Ecology of Disorder I (a Cobbs Creek chop shop).
234 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
There was about four or Wve bodies that was
found, to my knowledge, in the park.
Shirley (early 50s): A girl was killed back there.
Pam (early 50s): A young girl.
Shirley: They never did Wnd out who killed that
girl.
Pam: Or whether she was killed in the park or
wherever. She might have been dumped there.
Tina (late teens): I will not go back there.
Moderator: Why?
Tina: Because, I think it was last year, they found a
dead body back there in the creek.
Amy (late teens): There’s probably dead bodies in
that creek now.
Tina: It was some girl and she was back there dead
in the water.
Far from being a neutral backdrop against which violent
crime occurs, the park’s ecology—especially, though
not conWned to those areas dominated by thick, mat-like
weedy growth—is readily associated with criminal activity
and the loss of control and explicitly implicated as
being an increasingly deadly risk agent (see Madge,
1997; Burgess, 1998).
Rachel (late teens): It’s like there’s forest back
there. Once you get past the playground there’s like
a whole lot of trees and weeds and stuV. So once
you get back there, once you get behind that part of
the playground anything can happen to you!
Moderator: Are there certain parts of the park that
you think are less safe than other parts?
Tonya (late teens): In all those invisible places.
Kate (late teens): Behind all those trees.
Tyreisha (late teens): It’s like if you go back there
behind the playground, the trees are not safe.
Donna (late teens): Well, what I think is so scary
about the park is it’s just closed oV. It’s like, you
notice the park and it’s so nice and everything, but
then you go to the trail and it’s like trees, trees,
trees. And you don’t know like who’s back there.
You could get kidnapped and ripped up and
nobody would know (emphasis in original state-
ment).
Tyrone (late 40s): The grass isn’t cut. You can’t see
because of all the weeds. The weeds are out of control.
We won’t allow our kids to go but 6 or 10 feet
into the [woods] because of all the weeds. We can’t
see them. That’s so dangerous. Anything can happen.
Kids can get stabbed, kidnapped, murdered.
Normative ecologies (i.e., those perceived to orderly,
controlled, and well maintained; Fig. 5) are being
replaced or overcome by ecological and topographical
changes that are perceived to be disorderly and further
indicative of neglect and the absence of control. Fear of
the park, like fear generally, is discursively aYliated with
a perceived absence of control over one’s own well being.
Among the women of Cobbs Creek, this relationship
was explicit.
Shirley: It’s desolate and anything could happen.
And nobody from the street could hear me.
Tewanna (early 60s): Or see you.
Fig. 4. Ecology of Disorder II (kudzu in Cobbs Creek).
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 235
Shirley: Or see me. I’m afraid some nut ƒ
Christine (mid 40s): Well you see it’s not patrolled.
So there’s no patrol. You put yourself in danger by
being in an isolated place without control because
that’s the way the situation is.
Tewanna: The interest was there back in the day,
when our parents would take us up (to the park). It
was like an outing. Just to get oV the street and let
the kids rip and run. You didn’t have to worry ƒ
Today, you know, there’s no control (emphasis in
original statement).
Among the women I interviewed, the most common
response to fear and the perceived absence of control in
Cobbs Creek Park was complete or conditional avoidance
for both themselves and their children.
Monique: I’m 34 years old and I don’t even take
my kids there. I don’t even mess with it and I live
on the top of the block. My block comes right
down – at the bottom of my block I’m right at the
park. I don’t even walk my dog there ƒ My kids
used to play in the park before it got like it is now.
My kids don’t go in that park! My kids do not go
down in that park. (emphasis in orginal)
Nasheeda (late teens): I will not go down there by
myself. I will not! I see people walk down there,
walking on the trail by themselves, and I’ll say
“Are you sure you want to walk down there?” I’m
not going!
Shirley: I don’t do anything over there. Absolutely
nothing. And I love the park!
Among the women and children of Cobbs Creek
today, there is pervasive culture of environmental and
spatial alienation involving their relationship to Cobbs
Creek Park. It is a very diVerent relationship to the park
and its environs than their parents and grandparents
had. What was once a focal point of community
exchange and interaction has become, in the words of
Davis (1998), an ecology of fear. The questions now are
how and why did this happen? In what follows, I discuss
the dismantling of the control network that had protected
Cobbs Creek Park and its users for decades.
6. Race and the politics of park decline
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Philadelphia, like so
many other US cities, was experiencing an intense period
of civil rights activism, racial tension and violence. While
the riots in the north and south of the city gained the
lion’s share of police, public and media attention, it was
in West Philadelphia and the relatively placid Cobbs
Creek that a series of racially motivated events unfolded
that would change Fairmount Park’s place in the city’s
imaginary and, as a result, eVectively alter human–environment
relations and urban ecologies in Philadelphia
for the next thirty years.
On the evening of August 29, 1970, Russell Shoates, a
young man loosely aYliated with the local and powerful
Fig. 5. Ecology of control.
236 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
chapter of the Black Panthers, strode into the headquarters
of the Cobbs Creek District of the Fairmount Park
Guard, pulled a handgun, and shot to death the
unarmed oYcer on duty—Desk Sergeant Frank Von
Colln, a 17-year Guard veteran.7
Several blocks away, a
second Guard OYcer was shot and wounded by Shoates
and his colleagues minutes earlier.8
The following day,
two Pennsylvania State troopers investigating the crime
were the third and fourth shooting victims in Cobbs
Creek in a 24 hour period; neither died of their wounds.
All shooting victims were white men. OYcer VonColln’s
was the Wrst murder of a Fairmount Park Guard in the
line of duty in the Guard’s 105-year existence (Fig. 6).
His sudden, violent and unprovoked death stunned both
blacks and whites alike and was met with widespread
outrage and condemnation throughout the City of Philadelphia
and throughout the Cobbs Creek community:
Tom (early 50s): It was the Black Panthers. The
Black Panthers were coming on strong out of the
west and diVerent groups tried to imitate militant,
aggressive, black nationalists. You know, “Power
to the people. We ain’t taking it no more,” that sort
of thing. So a group was formed out in West Philadelphia
and actually the plan was to kill a [Philadelphia]
cop but it went sour. They was to kill a
cop in the street but it went sour. So instead of having
the night completely wasted, these nuts went
down there and shot an unarmed guy sitting
behind a desk. We were outraged. The entire community
was completely outraged ƒ It was just –
we all were casualties of that era, man. And it was
horrible.
The violence and carnage in Cobbs Creek that evening
could have been several times worse, as several military-issue
hand grenades—stolen from New Jersey’s
Fort Dix days earlier—were found cached in the general
area of the Guard station. Immediately, Police Commissioner
Frank (“The Big Bambino”) Rizzo—arguably the
most racially polarizing Wgure in Philadelphia’s history
and self-proclaimed “toughest cop in America”—pinned
the violence on
A group of fanatics, yellow dogs ƒ We’re dealing
with psychotics and we must be in a position to
take them on. These imbeciles and yellow dogs ƒ
When the police action is strong enough they will
want no part of the Philadelphia P.D. (Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin, August 31, 1970).
Within hours, Rizzo and the Philadelphia P.D.
embarked upon an intense manhunt and citywide cam-
7
Shoates and his colleagues were members of a group calling themselves
the Black Unity Council, whose ties to the Black Panthers were
loosely established.
8
Although Shoates was the gunman, Wve men were ultimately tried
and convicted in VonColln’s slaying.
Fig. 6. Body of OYcer Frank VonColln (Courtesy of Temple University Urban Archives).
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 237
paign of raids and roundups of any and all suspected
black militants that would bring Philadelphia to the
brink of outright racial warfare. In so doing, Rizzo’s
intended message of zero-tolerance stretched far beyond
the city’s borders to signal the attendants of a Black
Panther leadership conference scheduled for the following
week at Temple University that they and militant
black politics were unwelcome in Philadelphia. For the
next two years, Commissioner Rizzo would keep up the
pressure on the Panthers and other black power groups
in West Philly, doing his part to fuel what would be
referred to colloquially within the Philadelphia media as
a “HatWeld – McCoy-type feud” between the Philadelphia
P.D. and West Philly’s black activists.
Already stressed race relations were not the only victim
that evening; the violence of August 29th would be a
turning point in park-society relations in Philadelphia.
As the Fairmount Park Commission, itself, conceded,
“This attack, by militants intent on killing policemen as
a blow against authority, served to point out the vulnerability
of [the] Park Police.” In 1972, now-Mayor Frank
Rizzo (cash strapped and humiliated by the fastest growing
[34%] crime rate in the metropolitan US) would use
the event to justify dismantling the Park Guard and
absorbing its 500+ oYcers into the Philadelphia P.D.
Despite their uncertainty and ambivalence over the matter
(the Fairmount Park Commission repeatedly dodged
threats from and calls by previous city administrators,
including Police Commissioner Rizzo, to merge the two
institutions), and despite overwhelming opposition
among the Philadelphia public (a 1972 poll by the Philadelphia
Inquirer revealed a public opposition of 2-
to-1),9
the Fairmount Park Commission nonetheless
unanimously approved Mayor Rizzo’s plan on May 10,
1972. “In this way,” the Fairmount Park Commissioners
reasoned, “it was thought a more eYcient and productive
use of the Park Police would result.”10
While Rizzo
had designs on the Park Guard since his tenure as Police
Commissioner, his stated purpose for the merger was to
increase the number of available police on the street so
as to boost ongoing and strained eVorts by the Philadelphia
P.D. to contain or preclude rising levels of gangrelated
crime (the streets of Philadelphia, according to
Rizzo, were “worse than Vietnam”) and black resistance
occurring in the ghettos of North and South Philadelphia
at the time. To mollify any opposition or uncertainty
over the move, he publicly reasoned that local
police precincts would assume crime prevention activities
in the various sections of Fairmount Park. However,
Bill MiZin, a 30-year veteran and longtime Executive
Director (1988–2002) of the Fairmount Park System,
suggests a more personal vendetta was at hand
It was very interesting – and I remember it – a situation
that occurred in the mid-sixties. There were
[race] riots on north Broad Street. Civil rights
issues and marches ƒ Then-Police Commissioner
Rizzo called the [Fairmount] Park President and
said, “We need reinforcements. I want park guards
assigned to help patrol north Broad Street.” And
the [Fairmount Park] Commission President said,
“No. The park guards will stay in the park. They’re
not – these aren’t the kinds of things that they do.”
ƒ When Rizzo became Mayor four years later, the
Wrst month he took oYce he [disbanded the Park
Guard and] combined the two.
As expected, the Guard’s dissolution was met with
widespread condemnation and outrage throughout the
city, not only because of the Guard’s reputation among
the city’s population—both black and white—as cooperative,
reasonable, and non-violent (for instance,
throughout their history, the Fairmount Park Guards
did not carry weapons), but even more so because of the
Philadelphia P.D.’s counter repute as brutal, corrupt,
and racist—an image and disrespect it had honed under
the tutelage of Commissioner Rizzo (Fig. 7).11
As one
outraged observer wrote:
It’s obviously over now. The change [from horses
to cars] no doubt precedes the transition from Park
grey (sic) to black leather, hoodlum-type jackets,
Magnum pistols, Sam Brown belts and screaming
sirens on Park drives for no apparent reason ƒ
Assuming the Philadelphia Police Department’s
legendary capacity for corruption continues, it is
only a matter of time before ƒ we can look forward
to a rash of “line of duty” shootings sprinkled
throughout the Park and complaints of lesser
oVenses such as shakedowns and harassments ƒ If
there were any honorable intent in the upcoming
merger, the Philadelphia Police Department would
become a division of their proven superiors, the
Fairmount Park Police. (Letter to the Editor, Philadelphia
Inquirer, April 21, 1972)
The Park Guard, once over 500 strong (17.4 acres per
Guard) and distributed among six districts that spanned
the entire Fairmount Park System, is today represented
by 24 Park Rangers whose beats no longer include
Cobbs Creek or other marginal public lands beyond the
park’s more conspicuous, economically and politically
popular core (e.g., Wissahickon Park and Rittenhouse
Square).
9
Philadelphia Inquirer, April 19, 1972.
10
Annual Report of the Fairmount Park Commissioners (1971–1972,
p. 37).
11
In March of 1972, a report by the Southeastern Pennsylvania
Chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) criticized
Rizzo for his “refusal to demonstrate commitment to [Philadelphia’s]
black community.” The report further recommended the creation of an
independent civilian board to “police the police.”
238 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
The eVects of Rizzo’s action upon violent crime geographies
were immediate. Far from reducing street crime
(despite a shrinking population, Philadelphia’s violent
crime rate rose steadily throughout the 1970s and 1980s),
the immediate result of the Park Guard’s dissolution was
the spatial displacement of crime from the street into the
park.12
Furthermore, any subsequent protection of the
park and its users by the Philadelphia Police, as Mayor
Rizzo had envisioned it, failed to materialize. As former
Park Director MiZin notes,
Once the guards were assigned to these districts
they were assigned to street duty and the park
became an absolute afterthought ƒ [The police]
cleaned the corner [of crime] and just drove [it] into
the park. And there they stopped pursuing them.
So prostitution, drug selling, drug use all proliferated
in [the park]. [Parts of the park] became a no
man’s land, and the police clearly looked at it as a
second or third tier priority.
Among many Philadelphia residents, especially those
living in or using parks adjacent to high crime areas, the
abolition of the Park Guard in 1972 signaled the
moment of park decline and the fracturing of community–park
relations. As one park oYcial in charge of
community relations lamented, “It’s almost eerie how
many times that date comes up in our public meetings as
the date when the public perceives as the start of the
park’s decline because that’s when security was removed
from the park.” For the residents of Cobbs Creek,
the loss of the Park Guard was devastating; it represented
a hole in the social control network that the
Philadelphia P.D. were unable or unwilling—not to
mention distrusted—to Wll; the loss would fundamentally
reshape park–community and community–authority
relations.
Tom: The Park Guard was accessible ƒ they was
never bullyish. They were never like city cops at all.
They were really nice guys. They’d stop you from
neckin’ in the park. And at night they kept the
park safe. If you want to go out in the park and
just chill or something you knew you were safe,
‘cause at any time you could look up and see one
of them big horses standing over you ƒ I mean,
you could almost time it. Twelve minutes, watch
out, here come a cop - some place ƒ Those bridal
paths were covered by horses ƒ They weren’t
harassing people. They were just keeping it safe ƒ
To people who utilized the park, these guys were a
welcome – they were a beacon, man. (Fig. 8)
James (early 50s): We need a dedicated security
like they have at Pennypack or like they have at
Wissahickon. They have rangers; people who
know the rules as far as the park service is concerned.
The police are not familiar with it. But the
rangers are made familiar because they work with
the park service ƒ The police, they get calls but
they don’t know what to do. If you have a dedicated
group to be down there, and that’s their job
to go up and down the park – without service like
12
A similar pattern of crime relocation is currently unfolding under
Mayor John Street’s ‘Safe Streets’ Program.
Fig. 7. Frank Rizzo—the man and the myth (editorial cartoon, Tony Auth, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 1972).
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 239
that for a park this vast, you’re always gonna have
these problems. It’s not gonna go away with the
Philadelphia Police Department because they
don’t have the manpower to dedicate. They have to
have park rangers. Either on dirtbikes, on horseback,
mountain bikes or all three. You need something
to that level.13
Bernard (late 70s): You don’t see a policeman go
through here once a week, if that much. The only
time you see them going through is if someone has
an emergency, you know, an ambulance, you’ll
hear them. But as far as police going through this
area, it’s nil. The Cobbs Creek section? Nothing.
They just don’t come. They just don’t come.
7. The role of gangs
One of the more ironic responses to the rise of the
Black Panthers and the black power movement in West
Philadelphia was the dissipation of a gang culture that
for years had provided de facto security to Cobbs Creek
Park during the early years of black settlement in the
neighborhood. The identities of these early gangs coalesced
around the previous neighborhoods and parts of
Philadelphia from which the new youth of Cobbs Creek
had moved (see Ley, 1974). Despite the fact that the use
of guns was not common during this period, gang activity
nonetheless could be remarkably violent, with beatings
and murders occurring to a degree not experienced
in even the worst neighborhoods of North and South
Philly.
Tom (early 50s): As diVerent factions from diVerent
sections of town began to move into Cobbs Creek
they brought old ways with them. One of the old ways
was the corner ƒ What was happening was those
from South Philly was hanging out together, those
from Elmwood was hanging out together, those from
down the way was hanging out together, and North
Philly, because there wasn’t that many of us, we just
Wt where we could Wt. That’s almost how that street
cultural thing hooked up ƒ You had Woodland
Avenue, Osage Avenue, and Cedar Avenue. Now
they were the three major killer gangs. Now Cobbs
Creek had a gang called ‘The Creek’, after Cobbs
Creek. It never really took oV. They had a couple of
homicides, though. But it never became like Osage
Avenue, 60th
and Osage Avenue. Between Osage
Avenue, Cedar Avenue, and Woodland Avenue, in
one year twelve people were killed. That was back in
the heyday.
John (early 50s): If you didn’t belong to a gang you
risked a lot. While guns weren’t a big thing back
then, your chances of getting caught for being in
the wrong neighborhood – literally, the wrong
neighborhood – was a beating waiting to happen
ƒ I was in a gang. That’s how I survived. (emphasis
in original)
According to former gang members, Tom and John,
the public geography of gang activity was conWned to
“the street” and “the corner”. Moreover, there existed,
according to them, an unwritten and unspoken agreement
among gangs and gang members ensuring the
park’s neutrality and its use and meaning as a truly public
space. Cobbs Creek Park was not territory.
13
The Wissahickon, long considered the gem of the Fairmount Park
System, straddles the city’s northwest section and some of the wealthiest,
most heavily white communities in Philadelphia (e.g., Chestnut
Hill) (Fig. 2).
Fig. 8. “At the Stables.” Fairmount Park Guard, circa 1960.
240 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
John: The park was sort of that neutral ground
because everybody came to the park, and you had
picnics out there and all kinds of things in that
community – cook outs. Sometimes just the scouts
coming down camping; and a lot of the people
from the gangs. And they were all kids, teenagers
ƒ So when you saw each other [on the street] you
knew you were from the moon or from the coast or
from 58th
Street. But when you were in the park
you were in the park. “We’re here, you know playing
or whatever. If I catch you up on the street, you
know, you’ll have to hold your own.” So you
pretty much stayed in the neighborhood. You dealt
with people from your frame of reference – the
streets.
Tom: We did not allow gang Wghts or stuV to occur
in the park. That was neutral. We would not allow
it. A lot of the older people backed us up with that.
We didn’t have no gang wars. We didn’t have no
turf. The park was nobody’s turf. It belonged to
everybody. It was an unwritten agreement that the
park would be neutral. We had a lot of children
out there. We didn’t want no shooting. We didn’t
want none of that.
Indeed, Cobbs Creek Park served as haven of sorts,
where one could go—both gang member and non-gang
member alike—to escape the violence of the neighborhood,
itself. During this period in its and the community’s
history, the park was not only spared the kind of
violence plaguing “the street” but, indeed, it is safe to
assume that anyone considering committing a criminal
act in the park thought twice about it, knowing that they
would do so only at considerable risk of punishment by
the gangs themselves.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, under the growing
pressure of the black identity and black power movement
to cease black-on-black violence and focus their
energy and anger on greater social and political wrongs,
Cobbs Creek’s early gangs blinked out as quickly and as
quietly as they had emerged, taking with them the informal
park security that they ensured. Similarly, the
decline of the black identity movement and the outmigration
of middle-class blacks in the late 1970s left a
power vacuum that facilitated the re-emergence of gangs
in the 1980s. This time, however, their structure and
membership in no way resembled the organic, homegrown
gangs of the 1950s and 1960s; rather they
emerged in more violent forms and structures that mimicked
gang activity in cities like L.A., Chicago, and New
York, where there were no agreements, unwritten or otherwise,
on what did or did not constitute “turf.” With
very little to stop or resist it, violence rapidly took up
residence in Cobbs Creek Park where it has remained, in
one form or another, to one degree or another, for the
past two decades.
8. The Wnal straw
Soon after absorbing the Fairmount Park Guard into
the Philadelphia P.D., Mayor Rizzo again set his sites on
Cobbs Creek, the veritable thorn in his side where black
activism continued to foment. Park benches had long
lined the 11/2 mile stretch of Cobbs Creek Parkway,
functioning not only as a facilitator for park use among
individuals and social groups who may otherwise have
not used the park (for instance, the elderly or the disabled)
but, consequently, as an informal mechanism of
social surveillance (Jacobs, 1961). Their signiWcance to
park users and to the Cobbs Creek community at the
time is unquestionable.
Harriett: Walks in the park were very much a part
of community life and pleasure. I used to walk with
my mother in the park every Sunday after church
and sit for long periods of time on the benches
watching the world go by.
Julia: I used to watch the elderly, how in the evenings
after dinner they would take their walk in the
park. I thought it was so romantic. They would
take their walk in the park and just sit on the park
benches. You’d see husbands and wives in there, in
their seventies, just sitting on the park benches
holding hands! That’s beautiful!
Rebecca: It was beautiful. Beautiful! They used to
have a fence, one of those iron fences that went all
the way down, with the benches that you could sit
on.
Mayor Rizzo, as part of his anti-gang campaign,
argued that park benches were a menace and an invitation
for loitering, prostitution, drug dealing, and other
criminal activity. Once again, a browbeaten and demoralized
Fairmount Park Commission conceded and,
almost overnight, the park benches disappeared, to the
dismay and outrage of many Cobbs Creek residents,
especially older women.
Rebecca: [W]hen Rizzo came in he took the fence
down because he said people could rob you and sit
on the fence. Sit on the fence and wait for you to
come by. So he took the fence down and then for
the same reason they took the benches away ƒ So
it’s not as nice as it used to be.
Tyrone: The benches were where you could watch
the activity in the park. They provided opportunities
gossip and chat. They used to line the parkway;
now they’re gone.
Harriett: We need the park benches back!
In short, between informal surveillance along the
park’s periphery by park users sitting on benches and
more formal patrols by the horse-mounted Park Guard
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 241
regularly in the park’s interior, there was very little in
Cobbs Creek Park that went unnoticed. For all intents
and purposes, Cobbs Creek Park was considered a safe
place and, consequently, a popular and, more importantly,
a populated public space. More park users, in
turn, meant more available eyes on the park and its
activities. Their elimination expedited the park’s social
and ecological decline and eVectively ensured its future
neglect by user and manager alike.
Finally, despite the litany of concessions provided by
the Fairmount Park commissioners, in 1974 Mayor
Rizzo dropped the axe on the entire Fairmount Park
System, allotting the park just 1.1% of the City’s total
budget expenditures, a 50% cut from the previous
administration and the smallest allotment in the park’s
history up to that time (Fig. 9). It was a devastating and
demoralizing blow from which the park system has yet
to recover. In the years since, faced with dire economic
and social conditions citywide (Adams et al., 1991; Bissinger,
1997), subsequent administrations have done
little to reverse this trend of neglect. Confronting escalating
violent crime, poverty, deindustrialization, white
Xight and the exodus of the middle-class to the suburbs,
blight, and possible bankruptcy, Fairmount Park’s
Wnancial and political needs are widely considered
expensive and unnecessary luxuries alongside Philadelphia’s
more pressing social and economic woes. As one
City Councilman, whose district encompasses thousands
of park acres, lamented, “Trees don’t vote”.
Since the early 1980s, Fairmount Park’s operating
and capital budgets have represented less than one percent
of the city’s expenditures. Adjusting for inXation,
Fairmount Park has not experienced a budget increase
in over three decades. In 1999, the per capita park expenditure
was $13, a Wgure more than twice as small as the
next lowest per capita expenditure for an urban parks
system in a US city (Pittsburgh; $28/resident) and over
Wve times lower than the average per resident park
expenditure among the country’s 25 largest metropolitan
areas (Harnik, 2000). LayoVs have plagued Fairmount
Park in the three decades since Rizzo’s cuts. Today, the
number of full-time park personnel has dropped to an all
time low of just over 200, a 66% reduction in size since
the early 1970s. Routine maintenance activities (i.e.,
mowing, trash removal, etc.) dominate park management
protocol; however, even among maintenance
workers, staYng is a fraction of their recommended levels.
In 1994, 62 maintenance staV were responsible for
the nearly 8500 natural acres encompassed within Fairmount
Park, an average of over 136acres per worker.
The Park’s own records recommend a maintenance staV
nearly three times larger, or roughly 50acres per worker.
In short, Fairmount Park is understaVed and existing
park labor is overworked, with each staV member
responsible for nearly three times the recommended
workload. As a result, both jobs and places are triaged,
with the lion’s share of attention aVorded to those landscapes
whose “health” and appearance are considered
vital to Philadelphia’s viability and economic future;
landscapes on the margin, like Cobbs Creek, do not Wt
the bill.
Overall, the decline of Cobbs Creek and of Fairmount
Park, generally, has paralleled the decline of the
city’s white population over the past several decades
(Fig. 10), the result being that local opportunities for
leisure and public space participation among the city’s
growing black population are increasingly represented
by decaying ecologies and infrastructure. Places like
Cobbs Creek, at the margins of urban space, economic
activity, and political power, tend to be the Wrst to
see their resources diminish or disappear resulting in
more extensive and intensive changes in the landscape.
The consequences are apparent both physically and
socially.
Fig. 9. Fairmount Park budget as a percent of Philadelphia’s operating budget, 1950–2001.
4
3.5
3
2.5
Percent
2
1.5
1
1970
0.5
0
1950 2001
-0.5
Year
242 A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245
9. Conclusion
Sociologists have long emphasized the signiWcance of
social control to the production of urban social relations
and spatial patterns of mobility, access, and residence.
More recently, the discourse of fear, involving a perceived
absence or decline of control mechanisms and
institutions, has emerged to critique and expose the
structural factors involved in the shaping and conditioning
of marginalized urban human geographies. Feminist
discourse reveals the gendered patterns of mobility and
access to the public sphere as a function of perceived
safety and control among women, whose fear and perceived
risk of male attack undermines their free involvement
in urban public life and activity, a pattern that
Valentine, 1989, p. 389 terms the “spatial expression of
patriarchy.” Similar fears undermine the urban experience
among urban blacks, whose fears of white racial
violence and intolerance restrict public space opportunities
and activities outside of the inner city (West, 1989;
Feagin, 1991; Skogan, 1995; DeFrances, 1996).
Combining these perspectives with the theoretical
approaches and insights oVered by political ecology, this
paper suggests the roles played by power and social control
towards the production of hazardous, “unsafe”
urban ecologies that undermine the terms of access and
fracture human–environment relations among marginalized
urban populations. I have demonstrated how the
decline of social control mechanisms, both formal and
informal, change the nature of human–environment
experience from one of perceived safety and order to one
of perceived fear and disorder. Black women, in particular,
have been disproportionately impacted by the decay
of these surveillance mechanisms. Perhaps more than
any other social group, their overexposure to violence
and fear in the inner city constantly conditions their dayto-day
activity patterns and decision making, inXuencing
all spatial relations, environmental or otherwise. In so
doing, it builds upon a nascent urban political ecology
by demonstrating the signiWcance of urban social and
cultural theory to our interpretations and analyses of
urban environments. To this end, there is nothing inherently
unnatural or normatively profane with environmental
changes of the kind witnessed by Cobbs Creek
(Botkin, 2001) and the men and women surveyed here
appear to be universally concerned about the possible
risks lurking in the natural landscape, weedy or otherwise.
And yet, the uncontrolled growth of weeds and
their emerging dominance in the landscape do appear to
symbolize disorder, decay, and the absence of control
that accompany years of political and Wscal neglect.
Socially speaking, the signiWcance of weeds is not what
they do but, rather, what they represent; the same can be
said for the abandoned autos, heaps of garbage, discarded
needles, condoms, and drug paraphernalia, and
broken glass that are pervasive throughout the park.
And what they mean and how they are responded to
must be understood in a wider socio-political context.
Restoration ecologists, working simply from an ecological
imaginary based upon some normative landscape
type, would do well to understand this perceptual
dynamic (c.f. Higgs, 1997).
However, these two conditions—order and disorder—are
not universal; rather, they are social constructions
whose meanings reXect diVerential social relations
of power and control. Recent critiques of the powers and
institutions involved in deWning and disseminating social
order and control (e.g., Mitchell, 1995, 2003; Smith,
1996, 1998) have, justiWably, pointed out the inconsistencies
and disproportionate means by which it is meted
out, often singling out “others” for special disciplinary
control and exclusion. Exemplary patterns are readily
Fig. 10. Population and Park Budget Trends: 1950–2000. (Budget numbers multiplied by 10 for purposes of illustration).
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Year
Percent
Percent White
Percent Black
Park Budget (*10)
A. Brownlow / Geoforum 37 (2006) 227–245 243
found throughout the Rizzo regimes (both as police
commissioner and mayor). Indeed, even Rizzo’s decisions
to dismantle local social control mechanisms in
Cobbs Creek can, itself, be interpreted as a form of
social control—as a means of controlling social organization
and activity among a politically active black community
during a period of racial upheaval by removing,
for all intents and purposes, their primary public arena
of social intercourse and political exchange. The environmental
and social legacies of these mayoral actions
have been the focus of this paper. However, by emphasizing
only the inequalities and potential for violence
that often accompany authoritative, hegemonic mechanisms
of political and spatial control, critiques such as
Mitchell’s neglect the very real potential for “othering”,
violence, oppression, and fear that accompany control’s
decline or decay. As I hope to have demonstrated here,
social control is as much a mechanism for social and
spatial inclusion of otherwise marginalized populations,
as it is a political means for the social exclusion of other,
often oppressed social groups.
Finally, the story told here cannot be separated from
the larger, historical context of black racial and economic
segregation, deindustrialization, and economic
decline that have burdened Philadelphia’s past and
continue to plague its political and economic future,
with particular consequences for its rapidly emerging
black majority (Adams et al., 1991; Bissinger, 1997).
The segregation and poverty of urban blacks and the
apartheid-like social conditions that they facilitate,
condition human–environment relations and environmental
quality in urban black communities nationally
(Bullard et al., 1994). Similarly, park neglect and its
commensurate changes to the landscape is a national
trend, leaving the nation’s increasingly black urban
population to be the sole benefactors of any accompanying
risks that these changes may facilitate or produce
(Harnik, 2000). How women and children negotiate
and respond to these racially induced environmental
changes is an increasingly viable arena for political ecological
inquiry.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Rick Schroeder, Kevin St.
Martin, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments and suggestions to earlier drafts of this paper.
I would also like to acknowledge the men, women, and
children from Cobbs Creek and oYcials from the Fairmount
Park Commission for all of their time and assistance
during this research. Funding for this research was
provided by a Ford Foundation Community Forestry
Fellowship. Many thanks to Louise Fortmann for her
encouragement.
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