Planning with Fanon: The Puerto Rico Planning Board and Alienation in San Juan
By Joaquín Villanueva
At the core of Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric philosophy is his understanding of sanity or mental health. As he put it in Alienation and Freedom, “the sane human is a social being” (219). Sociality, the ability to be with others and among others, was Fanon’s preferred psychiatric therapy. Based on the level of “integration into the socius”, Fanon was thus able to measure the sanity of a patient (219). Withdrawal or alienation from the world was thus a sign of poor mental health so long as the socius was itself not dysfunctional. Unlike prevailing paradigms at the time that privileged either hereditary or individual traumas for explaining madness, Fanon emphasized the social origins of our mental states. As he famously articulated in Black Skin, White Masks, “alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny” (xv). In her reading of Fanon, Sylvia Wynter notes in “Towards the Sociogenic Principle” that “all humans wear cultural masks” and despite the fact that we are all biological beings, we “experience ourselves as human only through the mediation of the processes of socialization effected” by what we call culture (53). When we socialize, we become humans. Therefore, for Fanon, the alienated, withdrawn and “mad person is someone who can no longer find his place among people” (2018, 224).
[White U.S. American tourists enjoy a pool day at the exclusive Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo, El Mundo, 1963]
When we consider his entire corpus—from Black Skin, White Masks, which was based on his embodied experience as a Black Caribbean subject in the white world of postwar France, to The Wretched of the Earth, which was a gruesome account of the effects of colonial violence in Algeria—we can better see that for Fanon, the white world was a mad world. It made people mad by making them feel “superior”, on the one hand, or, much worse, “unworthy of entering the category of the human”, on the other hand (2018, 224). “In both cases,” Fanon observed, the patient “feels he [sic] is different” to the people in their surrounding (2018, 224). Those affective geographies of difference are dominant in the “euromodern” world whereby racial scripts, and their racializing/colonizing effects determine the place of individuals in the human/nonhuman spectrum. [1] According to Wynter, sociogeny is an “information-encoding organizational principle of each culture’s criterion of being/nonbeing, that functions to artificially activate the neurochemistry of the reward and punishment pathway, doing so in the terms needed to institute the human subjects as a culture-specific and thereby verbally defined…mode of being and sense of self” (54; emphasis added). What is the place of a Black man, asked Fanon, in a white world? When a young child shouted in the streets of France, “Tiens, un nègre! . . . Maman, regarde le nègre, j’ai peur!" (1995, 90), Fanon like many of his fellow Caribbean and African friends was differentially ascribed and verbally defined as a nonbeing. [2] Even though social integration was the preferred therapeutic means to disalienate withdrawn patients, Fanon increasingly asked, integration to what social world? “The white man is all around me,” cried Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask. And yet, the “white world, the only decent one, was preventing me from participating” (94). To transform the self, it was necessary to transform the world.
[Manichean geographies. Family living in El Fanguito, a slum just two miles south from the Caribe Hilton. Photo: Jack Delano, 1941]
In 1953, Fanon accepted a job at Blida-Joinville in Algeria where he was in charge of three wards of Muslim men and one ward of European women. Fanon introduced many cultural and social activities of integration aimed at enabling the patients “to become human beings again with personal aspirations” (2018, 312). Fanon fully immersed himself in the ward, thinking, studying, and observing the best ways to disalienate withdrawn patients. The goal for his patients was to “relearn to be like everyone else” (2018, 348). Toward that end, Fanon temporally and spatially arranged the layout of the ward so as to offer “opportunities for rapid integration that open onto a shared existence” (2018, 341). Ultimately, the fight against alienation “has to make possible interminable and fruitful encounters”, it must, in short, “facilitate social relations” (2018, 335). Spatial planning, according to this reading of Fanon, should aim to “institute a general framework for de-alienating encounters” (2018, 439), by purposely arranging – meaning, planning – the “spatio-temporal framework[s]” (2018, 418) that condition the “phenomenon of the encounter” (2018, 367).
Planning Alienation
This brief reading of Fanon as a planner provides us with a normative framework to evaluate and to reconsider planning practices. Following Fanon, I maintain that the goal of planning must be the prevention of the conditions that produce alienation by instituting “a general framework for de-alienating encounters”. Under that guidance, urban planning must work toward facilitating urban encounters, arranging space in such a way that it allows denizens the capacity to learn and re-learn how to relate to each other. Against that Fanonian principle, I evaluate the Puerto Rico Planning Board’s (PRPB) original policy to eliminate slums from the urban landscape, a strategy designed to better align Puerto Rico’s urban and industrial developments with the interests of U.S. capital.
I view the Planning Board as a key actor in the production of Puerto Rico’s euromodern sociogeny. More specifically, the PRPB operated as an “information-encoding” organization that verbally and spatially defined the zones of being and nonbeing in modern-colonial Puerto Rico. Capital fabricated many crises in the 1930s across the Caribbean. [3] The Great Depression severely shook the plantation economies in places like Puerto Rico where labor strikes, political contestations, and social unrest threatened to undo U.S. imperialism and its grip on the islands of Puerto Rico. In response, the Criollo elite in collaboration with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, began to push forward New Deal-style policies to help assuage colonial capital’s multiple contradictions. In 1935, tropical geographer, Earl Parker Hanson, serving as planning consultant for the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), wrote the first comprehensive report calling for the formation of a planning board to help guide Puerto Rico’s development. In the preliminary report, Hanson described the “deplorable” living conditions that afflicted large numbers of “impoverished populations” forced to migrate to the big cities (24). Hanson recommended the “clearance of slum acres, involving the demolition of unsanitary housing facilities” (24). Absent from the report were the voices of those verbally abstracted as “population” and excluded from the process of planning, slum-dwellers. Instead, planning in Puerto Rico would be geared toward seeking the removal of these nonbeings from the landscape.
In May 1942, Act 213 was approved, creating the PRPB. The law was designed by U.S. planners from Cincinnati and New York City, all close friends of Rexford Guy Tugwell, the last U.S. American governor of Puerto Rico. Because no actual professional planners existed in Puerto Rico, Tugwell assigned Rafael Picó, an economic geographer trained at Clark University, the task of directing the new Board. The lack of professional expertise also meant that for the first year of existence, the Puerto Rico Planning Board was under the tutelage of the National Resources Planning Commission (NRPC), a federal planning organization. The NRPC regularly sent consultants to advise Rafael Picó on best planning practices. Early in 1943, NYC planner, Lawrence Orton, visited Puerto Rico and provided advise on zoning and sub-division regulation. Drawing on a long imperial tradition that views Puerto Rico as a laboratory, Orton noted “the opportunity for introducing in Puerto Rico some of the most advanced [zoning] ideas of which our very forehandedness in many continental cities effectively deprives us”. Orton proposed to use zoning to “arrest development in slum areas”. For Orton, who spent a total of 18 days in Puerto Rico during this first visit, the “principal questions” regarding the growth of Puerto Rican cities was the “determination of the uses to which the large swampy poorly drained areas surrounding your cities shall be put.” [4] In other words, for Orton and many other imperial consultants, the main goal of planning in Puerto Rico should be the alienation and elimination of so-called slum areas.
In 1946, the Puerto Rico Planning Board adopted a new zoning regulation, following Orton’s advice, that created a new spatial category called “Zone M” or “Rehabilitation-Conversion” districts. Areas deemed slums by the new planning experts were thus categorized as a “Zone M”, prohibiting any new construction, improvement, or establishment of life-preserving and life-enhancing infrastructures, like electricity, clean water, or sanitation. Verbally and cartographically defined as zones of nonbeing, this new planning spatial category called for the mobilization of the police to ensure compliance with a regulation that explicitly called for the elimination of entire communities. Presaging the 1949 Housing Act, which cleared many slum areas across US cities following their labeling as “blighted urban areas”, Puerto Rico served once again as a laboratory for the spatial regulation of the euromodern geographies of being.
[Mapping zones of nonbeing. Slums and Public Housing in San Juan Metropolitan Area 1956. Source: Barañano, 1956, Plan Regional Area Metropolitana de San Juan]
In 1947, Puerto Rico signed the Industrial Incentives Act, a tax-incentive program designed to attract as much US industrial capital as possible to spearhead the industrialization, urbanization, and modernization of Puerto Rico. As the PRPB’s chairperson Rafael Picó once put it in “Puerto Rico: Its Problems and its Programme,” the goal of planning was to transform a “tropical climate” into an “industrial climate” (100). To attract private capital investments, Puerto Rico had to produce a new “legal, political, economic, social and psychological” landscape that would induce and retain industries into this tropical location. “We must bridge the gap,” concluded Picó, “between the ‘climate’ of the Continental United States and our own if we are to enhance the importance of our advantages” (100). In Fanonian terms, the PRPB produced new “spatio-temporal frameworks” through which US industrial capital was able to visualize the potential for capital extraction. Moreover, the clearance of the most visible slums in San Juan, such as the infamous El Fanguito, was part of the Planning Board’s efforts to transform the “climate” from its apparent tropicality and underdevelopment, to a modern, industrial frame that could be both attractive to manufacturers and tourists.
Conclusion
Through the 1940s and 1950s, the PRPB worked hard to create a world designed to attract US industrial capital to a place desperate to participate in the growing capitalist economy. Just like Fanon had experienced in 1950s France, slum-dwellers in San Juan saw a “white world” growing around them, a decent world perhaps, but one which prevented them from participating. Judged against Fanon’s planning principle, the PRPB failed to “institute a general framework for de-alienating encounters.” As a matter of fact, residents of El Fanguito were excluded from the new social relations being produced by capital. They were relegated to the zone of nonbeing, subjects not-yet-ready to fully participate in Puerto Rico’s euromodern economy. Following the elimination of slums, many displaced families ended up in public housing projects where as Zaire Dinzey-Flores notes in “Temporary Housing, Permanent Communities” they would begin “a steep and promising ascent in class status through public housing, which served as quarters to educate citizens for gainful employment, to learn to save and gather a down payment for a home, and to learn how to live a middle-class lifestyle” (468, emphasis added). Moreover, Dinzey-Flores argues in Locked In, Locked Out that housing projects for the urban poor were constructed near higher-income neighborhoods to help “maintain and deepen the sentiment of human equality” (39, emphasis added). The affective and pedagogical geographies of postwar urban planning in Puerto Rico aimed to integrate withdrawn subjects into the project of white modernity. Through housing ascendancy and state pedagogy, nonbeings could effectively transition to the zone of Being, becoming Humans-as-Criollos, privileged subjects with the capacity to mobilize class and racial power in Puerto Rican society. [5] Yet, such possibilities were transitory. The housing arrangements designed by the PRPB and other government agencies only exacerbated Manichean distinctions, preventing thousands of families from entering and living in zones defined by their exclusionary policies. As the century progressed, state pedagogy was replaced with violent policing in housing projects, rendering life in public housing projects even more disposable. [6]
[Chair of Planning Board, Rafael Picó (checkered shirt), alongside police officers, inspecting “illegal” constructions in El Fanguito slum]
For the new leaders of this almost-prosperous colony, humanity was defined by geography, where you lived culturally determined whether you were superior or “unworthy of entering the category of the human”. Slum-dwellers, in particular, were cartographically defined as nonbeings (Zone M), individuals who could only become full euromodern subjects through geographic progression. The PRPB helped produce a new “spatiogeny”, which has since determined the geographies of being/nonbeing. In this way, urban planning failed to transform the conditions of alienation. It categorized, displaced, and withdrew thousands of families from the project of colonial modernity. “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover the other?” (206), asked Fanon at the end of Black Skin, White Masks. Can we plan a city that offers opportunities for rapid integration that open onto a shared existence? Yes, Fanon would say, but only if planning-as-praxis originates from the world of nonbeings, where “a genuine new departure can emerge” (2008, xii).
Notes
[1] See Pedro Lebrón-Ortíz. Filosofía del cimarronaje. Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente, 2020, 109.
[2] Nègre, in the European imagination, denotes “not a human but an object”. More precisely, “the Negro is a phobic object that…arouses fear and terror. This phobic object is first discovered through the gaze” (138). See Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
[3] See Peter James Hudson. Bankers and Empire How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
[4] Report, Lawrence Orton to Rafael Picó, February 18, 1943. AGPR - Fondo Oficina del Gobernador - Gobernador y Gabinete - Junta de Planificacion - Box 1482 - National Resources Planning Commission.
[5] Elsewhere, I have elaborated the concept the “Criollo bloc” to denote the extent the Criollo elite, which has inherited privileges stemming from their whiteness, forged class alliances with US capitalists to administer the colony. For the first time in their history, since the 1940s the Criollo elite in power thought that their privileges could be democratized and be attained by others through ascendancy via proper social and spatial channels. Privilege-as-hereditary (phylogeny) was replaced by the idea of privilege-as-merit (sociogeny). Through housing many more subjects could be privileged as well, not just those born to the right family. Housing politics were geared toward “uplifting” entire communities of nonbeings to the category of “Human-as-Criollo”, that is as modern consumers endowed with the capacity of aspiration: to become respectable, whitened, heteronormative, subjects of modernity. See Joaquín Villanueva, Martín Cobián, and Félix Rodríguez. “San Juan, the Fragile City: Finance Capital, Class, and the Making of Puerto Rico’s Economic Crisis.” Antipode, 50-5 (2018): 1415-1437, and Joaquín Villanueva. “The Criollo Bloc: Corruption Narratives and the Reproduction of Colonial Elites in Puerto Rico, 1860-1917.” Centro Journal 34-2 (2022): 27-50.
[6] See Marisol LeBrón. Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019.
*Research for this article was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend Award.
References
Dinzey-Flores, Zaire. “Temporary housing, permanent communities: Public housing policy and design in Puerto Rico.” Journal of Urban History 33-3 (2007), 467-492.
Dinzey-Flores, Zaire. Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Frantz, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008.
Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. Eds. S. Corcoran, Trans. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Hanson, E. Planning problems and activities in Puerto Rico: Preliminary report to the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration and the National Resources Committee. Trans. N. R. Committee. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1935, 1-34.
Picó, Rafael. “Puerto Rico: Its Problems and its Programme.” Town Planning Review 24-2 (1953), 85.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’” National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America. Eds. Antonio Gomez-Moriana and Mercedes Duran-Cogan. London: Routledge, 2001., 30-66.
Dr. Joaquín Villanueva is a critical human geographer based at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico and Syracuse University, he has conducted research on urban political economy, carceral geographies, Latinx and Black geographies in Paris, New York, and San Juan. Currently, Joaquín is working on a book on the origins of the Planning Board and the urbanization of US imperialism in Puerto Rico from 1940 to 1960. His work has been published in Antipode, Society and Space, Centro Journal, and NACLA, among other journals. He is editor at ACME: An International Journal for Critical Human Geographies and serves on the editorial board of various journals in Geography and Puerto Rican Studies.