R. Norman Matheny/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Happy Berliners climb on top of the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate in the hours after the border opened on Nov. 1, 1989.

The eyes are what I remember best. And not just what I saw in them: relief, anticipation, joy. Rather what wasn’t there, as crowds of East Germans surged toward the barrier of concrete and barbed wire that had held them prisoner for so long.

It was the absence of fear.

The memories of that extraordinary evening in 1989 have come back to me this week as two deeply entrenched autocracies – Russia and Iran – face their most serious popular unrest in years.

Neither Vladimir Putin nor Iran’s ruling ayatollahs are necessarily nearing a Berlin Wall moment.

But the fall of the wall will be on their minds, too, and not only as a reminder that even the most harshly policed of dictatorships can crumble. They will find it hard to ignore the broader similarities between their dictatorships and the former East Germany – indeed among nearly all modern autocracies.

One parallel, above all: that the very same forces that allow dictatorships to survive also hold the seeds of their vulnerability and, potentially, their collapse.

Fear is a critical part of their staying power, fear of their determination to use whatever force is necessary to quash overt challenges.

Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters

A reservist drafted during partial mobilization says goodbye to his relatives as he departs for a military base, in the city of Bataysk, in the Rostov region of Russia, Sept. 26, 2022.

When that is gone, Mr. Putin and the ayatollahs well know, it’s only a matter of time before they are, too. That’s one reason for the violent crackdown on the protests gripping towns and cities across Iran in the past week, and Russia’s move to squelch resistance to Mr. Putin’s call-up of hundreds of thousands of men to bolster his flagging invasion of Ukraine.

But another hallmark of dictatorships will haunt the rulers of Russia and Iran even more.

It’s the unspoken social contract that keeps the great majority of their citizens from contemplating open dissent, much less rebellion.

It rests not just on fear, but also on a trade-off with those in power, understood by both sides. Yes, people say, we’ll stay out of politics, even if we don’t like living under your regime. But you have to give us a reason, and space, to stay out of the fray: a decent living and a fulfilling life for us and our families. In other words: We don’t mess with you, if you don’t mess with us.

In both Iran and Russia, that arrangement is in danger of unraveling.

In Iran, it’s because of the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She was rounded up by the “morality police” for wearing her mandated headscarf with insufficient modesty – a transgression that can mean something as minor as a few wisps of visible hair.

Within days, protests erupted not just in her own Kurdish region in northwestern Iran, but around the country. There have been other bursts of unrest before, in 2009 over the results of a rigged election, in 2017 over economic grievances, and in 2019 in response to a sudden hike in fuel prices.

But in both their reach and their roots, these protests are different. The women of Iran raised their voices first, but they’ve been joined by men. Ms. Amini’s fellow Kurds cried out first, but they’ve been joined by voices across Iran’s ethnic, social, and economic dividing lines.

WANA/Reuters

People light a fire during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by the Islamic Republic's "morality police," in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21, 2022.

The “tacit pact” that provides the ballast for dictatorships has been broken. Millions of women – as their brothers, fathers, husbands or partners also know – have been stopped by the morality police. What happened to Ms. Amini has personally touched them all.

In Russia, too, the tacit pact is under strain – because of Mr. Putin’s response to his army’s forced retreat in Ukraine.

Until the draft announced last week, the great majority of Russians had found it possible to tune out the conflict. They were encouraged by Mr. Putin’s public fiction that it wasn’t a war at all, just a distant “special military operation.”

Yes, many young, urban Russians were upset by the invasion and its diplomatic consequences – the West’s imposition of isolating sanctions on their country. Thousands had voted with their feet, leaving for other countries. A small, vocal minority inside Russia has been criticizing the war, despite increasingly harsh penalties.

But with the call-up of 300,000 men – and possibly many more – the situation has changed. Just as Ms. Amini’s arrest and death reached viscerally into the lives of millions of Iranians, the mobilization has brought the war home for many more Russians. Made it real. Immediate.

Their protests have been fueled by the rapid, often haphazard way in which the draft is being implemented. It has reportedly swept up not just the young militarily-trained men Mr. Putin said would be called upon to serve. It has taken untrained civilians and older men, fathers and grandfathers.

The immediate response to the protests, in both Russia and Iran, has been the use of force. That may work, for the time being. Those in power, and their security forces, still seem ready and able to crack down.

But these protests are different. And while that doesn’t mean they will bring either the Russian or Iranian regime to the terminal point reached in Berlin, another parallel will profoundly unsettle those in power.

For while the demise of a dictator’s rule can be long, sinuous, and ultimately unpredictable, the final chapter, when it comes, comes quickly.

Colette Davidson

Large apartment complexes, like this 41-unit building on Bryant Avenue seen on Aug. 19, 2022, are springing up around Minneapolis. But residents worry that they're not affordable.

Sarah Hopkins has lived in her two-story gray house on this relatively quiet block in northeast Minneapolis for six years, in harmony with her fellow renters, homeowners, and multifamily dwellers.

But she has mixed feelings about the changes her block is about to see. The city recently approved a local development project to build a four-story, 23-unit apartment building on a single lot across the street.

“It’s a weird place for an apartment,” says Ms. Hopkins, whose street is one block from a busy thoroughfare. “The aesthetic does concern me, and it will be a lot of extra action on the block. Where will they all park? What type of people will be living there?”

“If the housing is affordable, I’ll be fine with it,” says Seth Wester, a renter on the same block, out on a morning walk. “But as a millennial, 100% affordable housing? I haven’t seen it.”

The ambivalence of residents here is common across Minneapolis when it comes to housing development. In December 2018, the Minneapolis City Council approved an extensive housing plan that, among other things, put an end to single-family zoning laws.

The since-dubbed Minneapolis 2040 plan has allowed for multifamily development projects – mostly duplexes and triplexes – in neighborhoods with single-family homes, and removed certain restrictions on multistory apartment complexes on commercial streets. The goal is to create denser housing near transit, fight climate change, and eliminate racial and economic inequalities.

But while the Minneapolis 2040 plan was heralded as revolutionary when it was introduced, many question its efficacy at truly addressing the housing shortage and reducing disparities. Three years after the plan was implemented, the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and its neighbor St. Paul – were deemed by the United States Census Bureau as having the worst housing shortage in the nation.

And despite Minneapolis’ liberal majority, there has been a disconnect between residents who say they’re in favor, in theory, of creating more affordable housing and what that reality looks like in their own neighborhoods. Many locals are wondering, can the Minneapolis 2040 plan bring housing equality?

“The ‘not in my backyard’ concept is an age-old issue, particularly in wealthy, whiter neighborhoods, of people using their political and economic power to keep affordable, subsidized housing out,” says Anthony Damiano, a postdoctoral fellow and researcher in housing policy and structural inequality at the University of Minnesota.

“That’s something that the 2040 plan really does try to address, by increasing the amount of allowable density. It’s a conscious effort to make up for generations of past discriminatory practices ... but we need to monitor other changes in the housing market. You can’t just do the 2040 plan and call it a day.”

Colette Davidson

A new development project will see the house at center-left torn down and replaced with a four-story, 23-unit apartment building. It's one of many projects that aim to address Minneapolis's housing shortage.

“I don’t know how I feel about it”

When Minneapolis introduced its 2040 plan in 2018, it was already deep into a housing crisis. Since 2000, the city has lost around 15,000 affordable housing units, and in 2017, the Minnesota governor’s task force found that the city was short of around 50,000 homes.

The success of the 2040 plan hinges on the changes to single-family zoning, which put Minneapolis ahead of major cities like New York and Seattle, which still only allow single-family homes in certain areas.

But the city is at a building pace similar to that before the 2040 plan went into effect, and the removal of single-family zoning restrictions has only accounted for the construction of about 1% of new units. Officials say only around one-third of the 150,000 units authorized for construction will actually be completed by 2040.

The vast majority of new development projects here consist not of duplexes and triplexes, but of apartment complexes of five or more units. The 2040 plan’s inclusionary zoning requirements mandate that larger buildings must provide a percentage of affordable options for low-income renters. But critics say the costs of building affordable units could discourage investors, ultimately reducing supply and raising housing prices overall.

“I looked into living in that apartment but it was ridiculously expensive,” says Zach Cozine, pointing to the 41-unit apartment across the street that opened in September 2020. The building – built in a boxy style with flat wood-panel siding that is typical of new complexes around the city – offers rentals from $995 to $2,495 per month.

“I like to see new buildings going up, but it drives up the rent for everyone else,” says Mr. Cozine, who works at a coffee shop on Bryant Avenue in southwest Minneapolis. “It’s not all bad or good. I don’t know how I feel about it.”

The continued housing crunch is partly due to the lag time between housing construction and housing sales – residents here haven’t necessarily felt the long-term effects of the Minneapolis 2040 plan yet.

Still, a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis tracker showed that permits for multifamily buildings had underperformed in the last year. Dr. Damiano from the University of Minnesota says that the inclusionary zoning ordinance is good, but a drop in the bucket. And when it comes to truly low-income housing, “there is absolutely not enough,” he says.

There are hopes that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s proposal to put up to $18 million toward affordable housing will make a difference.

“This neighborhood has been such a huge part of my sense of community, but the prices are higher than further outside the city. Things have gotten crazy,” says Whitney Anne, who works at the coffee shop with Mr. Cozine and rents an apartment down the block.

She sees developers here trying to pack in more people, get rid of cars, and price out her neighbors. The median home value in Minneapolis is over $335,000, and the average rent for a one-bedroom is more than $1,550 per month.

“I don’t see a solution for myself,” she says. “I’ve been casually shopping for other places to live. For my survival, it might be time to move.”

“You can’t have it both ways”

In addition to creating affordable housing, the 2040 plan has tried to reduce the racial disparities that have affected the city’s housing market for decades. As early as 1910, homes in certain neighborhoods of Minneapolis included racial covenants: documents that banned owners from selling or renting to people of certain races, primarily Black residents.

Though the covenants have been banned since 1968, they contributed to pushing racial minorities into the outskirts of the city, creating segregated pockets and disparities in homeownership that still exist today. In 2019, Black homeownership in Minneapolis was the lowest rate of any metro area in the U.S. at 25%, compared with a white homeownership rate of 77%.

Since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, residents have become even more attuned to the city’s problems with racial inequality. Yet the changes to single-family zoning requirements have continued to create controversy among some residents. Nextdoor, an online neighborhood community platform, is filled with complaints about what multifamily units or low-income residents would bring to wealthier areas.

“Minneapolis is highly Democrat in politics but very racist when it comes to dealing with our problems,” says Mike Wedl, who was part of a working group at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis that helped write the 2040 plan. “We want to make sure poor people have access to jobs, etc., but we don’t want them to live in our neighborhood. Let’s quit pretending – you can’t have it both ways.”

The Family Housing Fund is one organization working to help people, especially households of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds, become more informed and proactive about homeownership. It helps to ensure that homes are affordable, to replace exclusionary screening processes, and to enable those with low and moderate incomes to increase homeownership opportunities. Since last year, it’s helped 30 people buy homes in the region.

“We’re trying to remind people that everyone deserves a place to live, and our neighbors are the same folks as where our children go to school together, where we work together. Housing is so foundational to someone accessing health care, maintaining their employment, and accessing higher education,” says Kirstin Burch, program director at the Family Housing Fund.

“We want to show that there’s a whole ecosystem that housing contributes to so that people feel more compelled to support more affordable and more accessible housing in their communities.”

The Minneapolis 2040 plan is still a work in progress, as residents remain wary of how new housing will directly impact their neighborhoods as well as whether true systemic change will come with it.

“People need to live. The city is building things, but they’re not affordable,” says Mackenzie Owens, a homeowner in south Minneapolis, taking a break at the coffee shop. “I support density. I’m not against building more apartments, but I’m trying to think of if it was in my neighborhood how I’d feel about it. ... I guess if it’s affordable, I’m for it.”

The Colorado River lives many lives – harboring trout in the Rocky Mountains, powering ACs in Arizona, greening fields of alfalfa in California. The 1,450-mile-long lifeblood supports more than two dozen tribes, seven U.S. states, and Mexico, but Americans living outside the Western region benefit, too. The river preserves national parks and produces winter vegetables, shipped countrywide.

Yet a long-term rise in demand – and increasingly arid conditions linked to climate change – have resulted in a dire river reality. Though conservation efforts have helped states stay afloat, negotiations aimed at better balancing water supply and demand seem as stuck as the once-sunken boats now seen in depleted Lake Mead. 

Worst-case scenario? Lake Mead and Lake Powell, major reservoirs along the river, could reach “dead pool,” with levels so low that water can’t flow out of those dams. That could turn off river supplies to cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

“A series of failures to govern, failures to make the compromises necessary to bring water supply into balance” could emerge, says Eric Kuhn, co-author of the book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.” 

While this is a longstanding problem, the river splashed back into headlines this summer with news of water cuts. Here’s some context for understanding why it’s been so hard to balance this water budget. 

Who’s in charge?

The official “water master” is the secretary of the Department of the Interior, which follows complicated rules for releasing Colorado River water from dams. But many levels of government are involved in river negotiations.

The river is regulated by a tangle of contracts, laws, and legal decisions, but the closest to a Magna Carta is the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The compact divided the flows into two basins – the upper (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico) and lower (Nevada, Arizona, California), each originally allowed an apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet per year. A 1944 treaty carved out 1.5 million acre-feet of annual flow to Mexico. (An acre-foot of water is enough to cover one acre, one foot deep.) 

Despite their high-priority water rights, many Native American tribes have yet to access their full allotments due to problems involving funding, infrastructure, and bureaucratic barriers. 

“Until you start to deal with the inequities or the injustice, you can never really have any momentum going forward,” Shaun Chapoose, chairman of the Ute Business Committee, told The Associated Press. 

How has the river – and need for its water – changed over time?

Demand for the river water has steadily grown over decades as Western state populations swelled alongside an agriculture industry worth billions, which is the largest Colorado River consumer. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of a mega-drought made worse by climate change, many experts say the real culprit responsible for lower flows is a process called aridification. 

The issue is that more water has been taken out of the reservoirs than what has flowed in over a long period of time, says Kathy Jacobs, director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona. 

“The water levels are declining, and so the focus is really on how can there be either a mandatory or voluntary reduction in the amount of water that gets distributed,” she adds.

Indeed, the Colorado River Compact refers to a river that no longer resembles what it was a century ago.

“The compact has weathered well because it keeps the states glued together and talking. It keeps them in the same room,” says Mr. Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. However, he adds, “it hasn’t provided a mechanism to adapt to change.” 

That’s where the multistate stalemate comes in.

Gabriela Campos/Santa Fe New Mexican/AP/File

Workers harvest and bag green chiles on Glen Duggins' farm in Lemitar, New Mexico, on Aug 27, 2020. The agriculture industry, worth billions, is the largest consumer of water from the Colorado River.

What hasn’t worked?

Reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell – designed to hold four years of water supply – have served as a savings account of sorts. However, those reservoirs are now hovering at about a quarter full. Some states have made considerable strides in conservation, but the status quo isn’t considered sufficient. Experts and officials say progress toward a sustainable future on the river will take compromise, as well as more action from the federal government.

In 2007, during the eighth consecutive year of drought in the area, river parties reached a set of interim guidelines that will expire in 2026. Those guidelines were updated in 2019 through drought contingency plans, which spelled out a series of water supply cuts – or tiers – triggered by water levels in the reservoirs.

Fast forward to last year: The Department of the Interior announced mandatory water cuts for Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico, triggered by those drought contingency plans. Then, this August, the government declared that another tier of cuts had been triggered for those same states and Mexico. (Water allocated to California, the Lower Basin state exempt from these cuts, is given priority based on a congressional act.) 

Separately, on June 14 of this year, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton outlined a 60-day deadline for basin parties, collectively, to find a way to cut an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water use, “just to protect critical levels in 2023.”

Yet, despite the stakeholders not having met that deadline, no clear repercussions from the federal agency have emerged so far.

The 721,000 acre-feet expected to be cut from Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico next year are roughly a third of what’s considered necessary to stabilize the reservoirs. Under the current drought contingency plans, Arizona will be hardest hit, with a reduction of 592,000 acre-feet, or 21% of its usual allotment. 

“It is unacceptable for Arizona to continue to carry a disproportionate burden of reductions for the benefit of others who have not contributed,” Arizona Department of Water Resources and Central Arizona Project leaders said in a statement. 

The problem seems to be a collective lack of compromise.

“It’s political resistance, it’s entrenched economic interests, and there’s this lingering, lingering hope that climate change is not real,” says Mr. Kuhn.

What are hopes for balancing supply and demand? 

A complex river system – serving an estimated 40 million people – will involve complex solutions.

Reducing demand is paramount, because it’s not obvious how supplies can increase, says Professor Jacobs, who has convened interdisciplinary conversations about the Colorado River. One idea involves expanding programs that would essentially pay farmers not to farm, so that their water allocations are conserved. 

“There are plenty of ideas about how the underlying allocation system could be modified – if people were willing to do that,” says Professor Jacobs. And yet, “there’s so much legal and financial investment in the status quo. It’s very difficult to make big changes.”

Incoming funds from the ​​Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act might also help. The latter includes $4 billion intended to help relieve drought impacts for the Colorado River and other basins. Meanwhile, stakeholder talks continue. 

And, for the first time, Upper Basin states and six tribes have begun a series of formal meetings focused on the water rights of tribal communities, reports Fresh Water News.

Editor’s note: The description of “dead pool” has been clarified.

In the days when he was crown prince, King Charles III voiced strong and controversial opinions on many topics. But he reserved his strongest and most controversial remarks for architecture and land use.

He once compared Britain’s postwar urban planners, unfavorably, with the German bombers that had reduced neighborhoods to rubble during World War II. Most famously, he called a proposed modernist extension to London’s National Gallery “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” (The project was killed.)

But Prince Charles wasn’t just a talker. He was a doer. Here on a sloping green plain in southwest England stands the fruit of his passion: an experimental town that the future king built. 

Founded in the 1990s, Poundbury has grown into a community of around 3,800 residents who live in an eclectic mix of low-rise houses and apartments built mostly to traditional designs, from Georgian townhouses to Italianate squares, though a few modern structures dot the townscape. The streets, few of which run in straight lines, are free of both litter and stop signs. There are no billboards, nor power lines. Ignore the cars and you can easily picture Sherlock Holmes arriving at a foggy crime scene. 

It is an ambitious project that expresses the new king’s vision of how Britain should build its way out of a housing shortage, a vision that is deeply personal and not universally shared, given his anti-modernist zeal. “It’s his baby,” says Pru Wintrip, who has lived in Poundbury since 2003.  

Now, though, the experimental town belongs to Charles’ son and heir Prince William, who has inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, first established in 1337, and its $1.4 billion portfolio of assets, including the land on which Poundbury is built.

“It’s something everybody has been thinking about for a long time,” says Blake Holt, who chairs the residents’ association. “Our assumption is that William will be just as engaged as his father was, and maybe in a different way.” 

Quirky mix and match

The project’s master planner is Leon Krier, a Luxembourg-born architect and theorist of new urbanism, a movement very much in line with Charles’ thinking that abhors auto-centered suburbs and favors walkable towns and cities that blend housing, business, retail, and green space.

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Blake Holt, who chairs the residents' association in Poundbury, stands outside his townhouse there on Sept. 14, 2022. He and his neighbors "buy into the ethos about building differently," he says.

In a 2014 essay in The Architectural Review, Charles said his goal was to create “resilient, truly sustainable, and human-scale urban environments that are land-efficient, use low-carbon materials, and do not depend so completely upon the car.” He complained that British towns “have been systematically broken down into zones with shopping and commercial zones sitting separately from the housing zones they serve, many of which look exactly the same.”

Poundbury’s architects have gone out of their way to avoid such repetitiveness. The project mixes and matches architectural designs and house colors and trims, which homeowners are obliged to maintain so as to preserve the town’s appearance.

It’s a quirky sort of place. Neoclassical squares sit next to pseudo-warehouse conversions; back alleys lead to mews houses, a style that originated as horse and carriage stables. Hundreds of small businesses are sprinkled throughout – bike shops and bridal gown seamstresses, clinics and beauty salons, cafes and a funeral home. 

The accretion of traditional styles of buildings seems to stretch back centuries, rather than decades, though the builders aren’t so fastidious: Some of what appears to be exterior metalwork is in fact painted fiberglass, for example. Ben Pentreath, one of the main architects, told The Guardian in 2016 that “we are engaged in creating a convincing fake.” 

But it has fostered a genuine community, which was one of Charles’ priorities. He has argued that car-oriented, purely functional-built environments lead to social isolation. In Poundbury, civic life thrives, from choirs and drama clubs to playgroups for children and a gardening club. Two community gardens offer plots to residents, the town square, Queen Mother Square, (named for Charles’ grandmother) hosts a food and arts festival in August, and a nondenominational Christian church relocated to the town in 2018.

“There is a strong community here,” says Mr. Holt.

A model for elsewhere?

Around 35% of homes in Poundbury are affordable housing, either sold at below-market prices or rented to low-income families. But these units aren’t clumped together, as they are in most British cities, and it’s not readily apparent which houses on a Poundbury block are social housing.

Toby Melville/Reuters

An aerial view of the planned community of Poundbury, a personal project of King Charles III, which he hopes will serve as a model for other urban developments.

Still, most homeowners are fairly affluent and include retirees like Mr. Holt, a former human resources executive, who downsized from a large rural property to a three-story townhouse. A two-bedroom house in Poundbury can cost as much as $500,000, and luxury apartments in Queen Mother Square run into the millions.

David West, a sales manager at a real estate agency, says buyers compare Poundbury with other well-kept towns around Dorset, a county that is popular with retirees, and “either love it here or think, ‘It’s not for me,’” he says. 

The ones who love it do so for the town’s style, an expression of Charles’ version of town life, says Mr. Holt. “People who choose to buy here … buy into the ethos about building differently [and] building an attractive, amenable community,” he says.  

The big question for urban planners is whether such towns offer any kind of model for how Britain should expand its housing stock amid rising concerns about affordability. 

Land-use restrictions have driven up housing costs to the point where home ownership is an impossible dream for many young people. In 2004, some 59% of 25-to-34-year-olds owned their own homes. By 2016, that proportion had fallen to 34%, according to a 2019 research paper.

The same study found that high prices reflected a sharp decline in new-home construction, particularly in southern England. Between 1959 and 1988, England built around 7.5 million homes. Over the following 30 years, it added only 3.3 million.

More than a “toytown”

To critics, Poundbury is a prince’s pet project, an anti-modernist statement that is too costly and cumbersome to solve a pressing housing crisis. But Mr. Holt says that misses the point that he has heard Charles make – that Poundbury’s advantage over cookie-cutter subdivisions is that it supports civic life.

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Pru Wintrip, a resident of Poundbury, talks to a postal worker at the front door of her house. Ms. Wintrip, a retiree, moved to the experimental town in 2003.

“I would argue … that it does not have to be more expensive,” says Mr. Holt. “Not necessarily with all the architectural flourishes and big squares, but to build in a more people-friendly and attractive way,” he says.

Even if it costs “a little bit more,” he adds, “isn’t it worth a little bit more in order to give people a better environment in which to live?”

Clare Rowlands, a health-care worker who grew up in the nearby town of Dorchester, thinks so.

In the early days, she says, locals dismissed Charles’ project as a “toytown” and her father would reminisce about the open fields that it replaced. But in 2012, Ms. Rowlands moved to Poundbury so her son could attend a nearby primary school. She likes her three-bedroom house, though she gripes about the rules that stop her replacing the original wooden windows with plastic frames, and she enjoys living in a walkable town.

When Ms. Wintrip and her husband moved here in 2003, their first house looked onto fields where they could walk their dogs. The couple later moved to a smaller townhouse; their son also bought his own home nearby.

But after two decades of watching Poundbury grow and fulfill Charles’ vision, Ms. Wintrip sounds almost regretful. “It’s too big,” she says. “It’s a town now.”

Musician Santigold’s latest album features a song that seems perfect for lying in a hammock on a beach. The pop star sings a jaunty melody over the breezy patter of hand drums and a reggaeton synthetic bass line. But a closer listen shatters the idyllic illusion. The song, titled “No Paradise,” has lyrics that describe a populace suffering from systemic oppression. Yet it isn’t entirely bleak. It includes a recurring refrain: “There’s power in our struggle.” 

“The power is from the growth that takes place in hardship,” explains Santigold (whose birth name is Santi White) in a recent Zoom audio interview. 

Her latest album, “Spirituals,” which landed earlier this month, is a testament to fortitude. It’s the sixth release by the Los Angeles-based artist who first made a splash with her 2008 debut, “Santogold,” a synthesis of indie rock, hip-hop, electronica, reggae, and new wave pop. 

“Spirituals” was birthed during the 2020 lockdowns. It was, she recalls, a dark and heavy period in which she was in survival mode. 

“You get knocked down,” she says. “Just the strength that it takes to get back up, you’re learning about your own resilience as a human being and that you can actually make it through.”

Getting beyond writer’s block 

Even before the lockdown, Santigold had been struggling with writer’s block. The words used to come easily – whole songs written in the space of 10 minutes. The hit-maker behind songs such as “L.E.S. Artistes” and “Disparate Youth” is a sought-after collaborator, working with the likes of David Byrne, Jay-Z, Devo, and Tyler, the Creator. During the pandemic she was buoyed by the unexpected gift of being invited to record a duet on reggae pioneer U-Roy’s final album, “Solid Gold.”

“She has such a brilliant emotive quality,” write the album’s married producers, Zak Starkey (drummer for The Who) and Sharna “Sshh” Liguz, in a joint statement provided by their publicist. “She’s punk rock, but soulful with authenticity and diversity that we admire and vibe off in a big way. It was awesome to have her collaborate on ‘Man Next Door’ with U-Roy. Her vocals were the perfect blend of haunting beauty to the big toast of Daddy U-Roy.”

Santigold’s battle to create her own music was affected by looking after 2-year-old twins and a 6-year-old son. The closure of schools during the pandemic compounded the struggle. 

“It felt suffocating, you know, just morning after night ... just cooking, cleaning, changing diapers,” says Santigold. “No time to think. No time to even shower.”

Feeling increasingly disconnected from her artistic side, Santigold fought the urge to panic. She recalled a Joni Mitchell interview about fallow periods in which songwriters need time to gather new experiences and perspectives. Her creative pilot light hadn’t gone out. The events of 2020 – the fear of disease, wildfires that colored the skies dark orange, and news reports of Black people killed by police – turned that flicker into a flame. 

Heeding the urge to write, Santigold made a deal with her husband. She would cook dinner and then, while he and the children were eating and cleaning up afterward, she would go off and write. The songwriter immersed herself in a flow of inspiration.

“As an artist, when I create, often it just requires me to move myself out of the way so that I can receive ideas and messages from a higher version of myself or even, you know, the universe,” she says.

Santigold had planned a North American tour to support the new album starting in October. But today she announced that she has canceled all her shows. In her interview with the Monitor earlier in the month, she said that touring has become unsustainable since the pandemic due to a combination of inflation and a glut of acts touring at the same time.

“How could I release Spirituals, an album about honoring yourself and refusing to cross your own boundaries, and not take this opportunity to do just that for myself?” she said in a letter to fans on her website. 

Her songs on “Spirituals” often focus on resilience in adverse circumstances. The first track on the album, “My Horror,” addresses the instinct to escape life’s challenges through video games, drugs, or social media. Santigold believes that difficult times are an opportunity to ask oneself, “What change am I afraid of?”

“The way through that is for everybody to just do the personal work at an individual level. And a lot of the work is within our bodies, learning to honor the discomfort as a tool for evolution,” says the songwriter. “Whether you’re talking about human beings on this Earth, or Black people in this country, we have shown over and over again that we do have what we need to keep going. We’ve seen the resilience.”

An album title with meaning

That’s why Santigold titled her album “Spirituals.” It’s a nod to the form of singing pioneered by enslaved women. 

“Making this music was a transcendental experience,” says the artist. “It allowed me to kind of escape the physical environment through the music and just experience a bit of freedom and also some beauty and light to move towards. And that’s pretty much what the job of original Negro spirituals was. ... That’s what the songs did for me.” 

AP/file

Ethiopia holds a military parade in Addis Ababa with national flags attached to the rifles of soldiers in the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF).

Over the past 700 days, the government of Ethiopia and militias in the rebellious state of Tigray have fought a costly civil war over a question of national identity: Should the country remain a loose federation of ethnic states or embrace a common democratic future based on what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed calls “Ethiopianness”?

The conflict has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced more than 2.6 million others, and put 9.4 million at risk of starvation, according to estimates by the United Nations and other sources. Each side blames the other for breaking a truce in August. They can’t agree on who should moderate talks led by the African Union.

There are signs, however, that a stalemate on the battlefield is galvanizing a consensus that Ethiopia should be united by shared democratic values, common interests, and cherished traditions rather than war. 

Women’s groups held marches on two consecutive days in the capital, Addis Ababa, in early September to protest war-related violence against women and children. That coincided with statements by three different groups of civil-society organizations, teachers unions, and media groups demanding an end to violence against civilians and a peaceful resolution of the war.

“There is no part of society that benefits from conflict and war,” the Ethiopian Media Council stated on Sept. 10. It called for preserving “the co-existence and solidarity of our society.”

For decades, since the end of the Cold War and especially colonialism, several African societies such as Rwanda and South Africa have grappled with forging national identities through forgiveness-based models of restorative justice. Ethiopia’s experience may be more analogous to the former Yugoslavia, which fell into ethnic conflict after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.

Ethiopia’s experiment in ethnic federalism started after the 1991 fall of a longtime military dictatorship. The idea was enshrined in a new constitution in 1995 and was meant to recognize the diversity of a society with more than 80 ethnic groups.

When Mr. Abiy was elected in 2018, he embodied a new idea. His father was Muslim, his mother Christian. Each came from one of the country’s two largest ethnic groups. The new prime minister vowed to build a future based on a common sense of nationhood. His political reforms instead provoked war. Tigrayans, who represent just 6% of the population but ruled for most of the last 30 years, felt pushed out. In November 2020, they went to war to protect their regional autonomy.

A U.N. report last week underscored the urgency of finding a solution to the conflict in Ethiopia. It noted that fighting has spread beyond Tigray and, in at least one other state, “hate speech attacking and dehumanizing ethnic groups, a key indicator of future atrocity crimes, shows no sign of abating.”

Although the government, together with its allies from neighboring country Eritrea, has Tigray surrounded with an estimated half a million troops, the threat of a prolonged conflict to both national and regional stability, together with growing public protest, may be tilting the balance toward dialogue.

“This is the moment we have to look into our pasts to reconcile, to forgive each other,” Mohammed Dirir, a member of the National Dialogue Commission, told NPR last week. “There is no other choice.” That recognition may mark a hard-won turning point for Ethiopia after two years of war.