Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer 
MARLEY
WESTERN BUREAU: IN INTRODUCING the guest speaker at last Friday's 8th annual Bob Marley Lecture, Professor Carolyn Cooper related some of the email messages that had passed between her and Dr. Patricia Anderson.
In one of them, on being reassured that Marley's music would be played as the audience gathered, Anderson replied: "I am looking forward to being able to present in a different format, instead of the usual objectives, methodology, findings, discussion harness."
The reference to a 'harness' prompted Professor Cooper to remark that "It strikes me that within every upstanding, respectable
academic, there resides a free spirit just waiting to 'bus' out in a lecture entitled 'Inna Govament Yard'", to which the large audience gathered at the undercroft of the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus chuckled collectively.
The full title of the lecture developed on the Marley line from No Woman No Cry to read 'Inna Govament Yard: the Challenge of Community and Housing In Kingston's Inner City', gave Dr. Anderson, a senior lecturer in the university's department of sociology,
psychology and social work, ample room to explore and that she did.
Video inserts of well-known housing developments in Trench Town, McIntyre Villa (or Dunkirk), Denham Town and Rema, among others, were augmented by Marley music, with even a live role play of research students
getting the reaction of residents to their
housing conditions.
Her opening statement set the stage for a
riveting trip into the dynamics of Jamaican society, seen through the development of the famed 'govament yards', whether of the tenement or high-rise variety. "For a long time, we have been haunted by the image of two Jamaicas, those who have food and those who have not; those who have shelter and those who do not; those who have voice and those who have not; and now those who have guns and those who do not," she said.
PERCEIVED OVERRIDING WOES
She recounted the perceived overriding woes of the inner-city communities lawlessness and no sense of community included which make us "forget about the decent people we know who live close to the poverty line; who live in the inner cities and are more likely the victims of violence than the perpetrators".
Dr. Anderson cautioned that "If we commit the serious mistake of believing that the two Jamaicas, which are created by economic hardship, are also two worlds with different value systems and aspirations, then it is
impossible for us to advance as a country".
She stated: "This underlying belief, that 'they' are different from 'us', is one of the most stubborn legacies of colonialism. This belief has been most clearly reflected in the history of public housing in Jamaica."
Dr. Anderson said that the issue has been informed by three questions: What do the
people need? What do the people deserve? What can the people appreciate? And there has been a fourth which enters the discussion from a different angle: What can the government
afford to do?
HISTORY OF HOUSING
She invited the audience to go along on a journey into the history of housing and community in Jamaica, which involved going back to the housing provisions in the early 1960s and 1970s, as well as looking forward to the the new inner-city programme being spearheaded by the National Housing Trust (NHT), after a 20-year absence of government from public housing provision.
The journey looked at the cramped spaces and overcrowding that are rife in the respective inner-city communities, going into exacting detail in construction and design, as well as the resulting social values and behaviour they engendered.
In looking ahead, Dr. Anderson said "At
present, the NHT is engaged in constructing a jewel in the Trench Town area". Coming to the end of the journey, she said that it seems to point to a general conclusion: "Even if there is a border, there cannot be a borderline. But the border will become a borderline if the border is expected to separate the privileged from the depressed and the outcast."
She concluded a riveting presentation by saying: "There is a common Jamaica in which all people assert citizenship and this is the Jamaican yard. Welcome home."
