Entry eighteen - Kampala, New York, and the Gentrified Urban Jungle

I apologise for my little three-month vacation from the world of blogging... I have no good excuses, or bad ones for that matter. However, I hope that this string of entries (saved up from the previous months) make up for some of the absence.

In any case, I would like to dedicate this entry to an observation that I made today about Kampala and New York. These two cities where I have spent the past two years are both booming metropolises with falling crime rates, incessant construction and growing "gentrification", at least in some areas. I had friends in New York living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, i.e. Bed-Stuy, just across from the Marcy Projects (home of the late gangster-rapper Notorious B.I.G.) because it was one of the only neighbourhoods with apartments that they could afford. Although things still looked grim, a block of condos was going up nearby, and I even heard rumours that a Fresh-Direct truck had been seen cruising the adjacent neighbourhood. I have a friend in Kampala living in Makerere-Kivvulu, which since the days of colonial segregation (between Europeans, Asians and Africans - which is still evident in the city's architecture) has been a very poor African slum, because it is the only area that he could afford. Although it is still a very poor neighbourhood, across the street from his apartment is a huge recently-opened conference facility, and nearby are a few newly-constructed spacious houses for Kampala's middle class. I am myself considering moving into some apartment blocks on the edge of this neighbourhood. In the adjacent slum of Katanga, the university recently razed the structures of a few hundred people (squatters, they were called) in order to pave the way for more university facilities. Kampala's suburbs are undergoing even greater transformation as the super-rich seek new neighbourhoods with cheaper land.

However, well within my lifetime, both of these cities were (in the portrayals of some) dangerous, decaying and grungy hell-holes. This is evident in the infrastructure and architecture or both Kampala and New York, even as things (for some) swing economically upward. Twenty years ago (and assuming that I was still twenty-three rather than three years old), I would not have considered entering either Bed-Stuy or Kivvulu for simple reasons of safety. In New York, the cracked sidewalks, run-down buildings and few remaining poor residents of areas such as Park Slope make the current scene of upscale bars, restaurants and boutiques seem like they were dumped on top of a ghetto - which in some ways they were. Someone who lived in Park Slope in the early 1980s said that at that time there were prostitutes and various shady characters on almost every block, and most bars were too dangerous to enter after 10:00. After he moved out in 1981, apparently things got even worse. Today the area is divided into three sections, one industrial, one trendy, and the other yuppie (the industrial one is the only area with rent under 800 USD/month).

The area of Kabalagala has been the centre of Ugandan nightlife for the past quarter century. However, it is located far to the south of the city centre and is surrounded by a mishmash of very upscale and run-down neighbourhoods. When these areas were all poor, and home to a good portion of the population of Kampala, Kabalagala was a popular centre of social activity because it was too dangerous to move around at night between there and the city centre. Although a recent effort to pave Kampala's streets before this year's Commonwealth Conference has improved the situation, until recently the road to Kabalagala was treacherous, doing great damage to any non-4WD vehicle attempting to manoeuvre through it at night. But due to the city's history, this is where the best nightlife in city is. Even downtown Kampala consists of a mix of empty lots, run-down colonial-era buildings and sleek new skyscrapers.

There isn't any grand conclusion that I plan to draw from these observations. However, my experiences of both New York and Kampala are those of prosperous commercialism hastily laid out over gritty urban jungles. Movies, friends and newspapers tell me about how walking through Central Park was asking to get robbed. Books, friends and at least one film tell me how walking, or driving, across Kampala at night was asking to get shot. No doubt these images are greatly distorted, since I know people who have lived in both places for decades and have fond memories of past years. However, the speed with which these cities were significantly transformed gives them each a kind of surreal quality, especially since the architectural and infrastructural changes haven't always kept pace with the monetary and social ones.