Page:“Trench Town Rock”： Reggae Music, Landscape Inscription, and the Making of Place in Kingston, Jamaica.pdf/3

Urban Studies Research communal bathrooms and kitchens. The housing project came out of a necessity to provide low cost housing to Kingston’s rapidly increasing urban population and the increasing prevalence of squatter settlements. Totalling only 60,000 people in 1900, Kingston’s population had reached 380,000 in 1960 (a sixfold increase). Kingston’s population more than doubled between 1943 and 1970, with the rate of growth peaking in the 1950s at 3.2 percent per annum (twice the national average at the time). Most of this growth was accounted for rural to urban migration. An increasing number of these migrants were forced to settle in the shanty towns and squatter settlements that had emerged along the city’s outskirts and along the fringe of the tenement area of West Kingston. Clarke described the squatter settlements as consisting of one-room huts constructed from packing cases and fish barrels, cardboard, and polythene and having few public amenities if any at all.

Trench Town, formerly known as Trench Pen, was a thirty-three-acre cattle estate located near downtown Kingston. Although it is a common misconception that the name “Trench” was derived from the large open sewer that runs through the middle of the community, Trench Town obtained its name in the late 18th Century after its owner James Trench, a prominent Irish immigrant who at the time, was utilising the vast area of land to rear livestock. Trench Pen remained under private ownership until 1910, when the last surviving member of the Trench family passed away. Trench Pen was later placed under the responsibility of the general administrator Mr. Nethersole who immediately appointed a management team to organize what had become a rapidly growing community intertwined with peripheral shanty towns.

By the 1930s, Trench Town had become a fairly established settlement situated within close proximity to some of Kingston’s most depressed squatter communities. Patterson in his novel “The Children of Sisyphus” described the extremely harsh and insanitary living conditions residents of the “Dungle” had to endure—one of the first squatter settlements that had emerged in West Kingston that was also used for dumping garbage. Trench Town later became a fully fledged township when the colonial government initiated a major project through the then Central Housing Authority (CHA) to convert the approximately 200 acres of vacant land into a model township that comprised a range of owner-occupied and rental housing solutions. By then, Trench Town and the western section of Kingston in general had become a preferred site for rural migrants due to its close proximity to the market district of downtown Kingston and the vast tracts of unoccupied lands. In fact, the Trench family had already started to rent pieces of the estate to the wave of rural migrants that ventured to Kingston in search of job opportunities prior to 1910.

Most of the new housing developments in Trench Town during the 1950s and 1960s (popularly known as “government yards”) consisted of one- or two-storey concrete buildings, built around a common courtyard with communal cooking and bathing facilities and a standpipe for accessing potable water. Each block comprised several small living quarters opening onto the shared courtyards. Though these housing schemes were intended to serve as a model for low-income housing development in the newly independent nation state, the units that were eventually constructed were far from perfect. Due to a shortage of state funding for instance, no sewage system was initially set up for the community. As a result, the improper disposal of household waste including human refuse in nearby lands was a common practice among community residents.

West Kingston and Trench Town in particular became unstable and dangerous from the early 1970s onwards. The large concentration of mostly disenfranchised and impoverished households made the general area a prime target for the two rivalling Jamaican political parties—the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). As early as the mid-1960s, new housing units were constructed to accommodate increasing numbers of political supporters of whichever party was in power. This soon escalated into a spate of politically-motivated violence between supporters of the two rivalling parties beginning in the mid-1970s. The violence continued way into the 1990s, claiming the lives of hundreds of inner-city youth residing in the highly impoverished neighbourhoods of West Kingston—including communities like Trench Town, Rema, Arnette Gardens, Denham Town, and Tivoli. Some insiders’ books illustrate the extent of the violence of those times, starting with Phillip Baker’s “Blood Posse” and Vivian Blake’s (auto)biography on the infamous Tivoli Garden’s “Shower Posse” gang —both underlining the parasitic and highly violent nature of Jamaican politics.

Trench Town’s location places it in a peculiar situation. As Eyre points out the community horrendously sits on the “frontline” (locally known as Berlin Wall, Dead Man Gulch, or No Man’s Land) that separates two sets of opposing political enclaves, generally known as “garrison” communities. These garrison communities are a major and unique feature of Jamaican politics and are the results of more than fifty years of political favouritism and coercion between the two major political parties and their affliated gangs. Figueroa and Sives define the term “garrison” as representing in its most extreme form “a totalitarian social space in which the options of the residents are largely controlled.” Eyre described this as a “very real [political] frontier between the two [enemy] territories [that] zigzags through the most densely populated section of Kingston.” According to Figueroa and Sives this “frontier” is just as dynamic and mobile as the garrison themselves, and the buﬀer community of Trench Town has alternatively been a JLP garrison (during the 1940’s and the 1989 general election), a split garrison with one side strongly PNP and another side strongly JLP (during the 1950’s) and a mixed community where vote patterns were more heterogeneous (Figure 2).

The political warfare that has ravaged the community has had two distinct effects. On one hand, Trench Town’s physical landscape has rapidly deteriorated. The once modern housing project has been reduced to a cluster of dilapidated buildings, some of which have been abandoned and left in ruins. As everywhere else in the Third World the structural adjustment programmes undertaken by the