Martin Henry

Handing over houses to constituents, the honourable member for South West St. Andrew, who is now Prime Minister of Jamaica, went on the warpath against critics of her stewardship as Member of Parliament for one of the most blighted patches of Jamaica.

When I wrote about my intimate knowledge of South West St. Andrew and watching its decay for 30 years, in March while Mrs. Simpson Miller was Prime Minister-in-waiting, I received the most interesting correspondence from someone who knew both the area and former PNP caretaker Jason Gordon very well. The correspondent sought to explain the consolidation of South West St. Andrew as a decaying PNP stronghold and the personal and developmental costs.

The Prime Minister has declared her intention to use the power of the office to get done things in South West St. Andrew that she could not have accomplished as a mere mendicant MP. But the effort must be recognised for what it is: a reconstruction. Bad to bad, Edward Seaga, as mere minister, converted Back O'Wall into Tivoli Gardens - with its own price tag - while neighbouring SW St. Andrew headed south in decay.

A number of 'pens'

History matters. On the 300th anniversary of the city in 1992, Anthony Johnson, who is a better historian and writer than politician, produced a lovely pictographic history of the city. The 'city', laid out in square grid after the Port Royal earthquake of 1692, was originally bound by North, East and West streets and by the harbour on the south.

Everything else grew up around that. A number of 'pens' - Jones, Trench, Admiral, Whitfield and, of course, Greenwich Farm, developed into well-appointed middle class residential 'towns' as suburbs of the 'city'.

Decay

Two nasty things subsequently happened to Kingston: Unplanned, 'wild bush', urban growth all the way into the hills of St. Andrew; and the political garrisonisation, and criminalisation, and decay of where has now become the 'inner city'.

We hope the Prime Minister using the power of the office to 'instruct' and to get things done will go well beyond SW St. Andrew and push for the wholesale rehabilitation of the inner city, and for the planning and regulation of urban space in the capital city which has so much potential for grace and beauty and efficient functionality.

Some weeks ago, scientific environmentalist and disaster man Franklin McDonald emailed me a New Scientist article about how drugs and crime were stymieing efforts for the management and conservation of natural resources on the Baja California peninsula of Mexico. I shot back that, "If you suspend the conservation impact consideration for just a moment, this is very much like where we can't freely go in more and more of Kingston and the rest of Jamaica for the same reasons."

McDonald put me in touch with David Dodman at the Department of Geography and Geology at the UWI whose 2003 PhD thesis at Oxford was 'Nature, Power and Participation: An exploration of ecology and equity in Kingston, Jamaica.' Dodman argues that environmental problems [which are his concern] cannot be understood or alleviated without knowledge of their economic, political and cultural aspects.

Urban environmental problems require political solutions that address uneven power relations and ineffective structures of urban governance.

Analysis

But it is his scintillating analysis of the city [about which I would like to say more later] through the eyes of the least powerful from the vantage point of a then mid-20s white man who was brought here as a young child by missionary parents, Roy and Jane Dodman, that captured my imagination.

By the sheerest coincidence, right after I read Dodman's thesis, his supervisor at Oxford, Professor Colin Clarke, has come here as a guest of the University of Technology. The Faculty of the Built Environment, with a Department of Urban and Regional Planning, is hosting a series of presentations on Kingston by Prof. Clarke, who has lived and researched here. This morning he conducts a seminar on urban analysis for policy formation. Tomorrow evening he addresses urbanisation and social stratification in Kingston since Independence. Best of all, Clarke's book, Kingston, Jamaica, Urban Development and Social Change, 1962-2002 will be launched.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.