I don't completely agree with what she is saying. I think that public spaces are created by individuals and experiences vary from individual to individual. An environment can create a way people feel about something but I don't think it will help someone to develop political thoughts.
As for people having the option on where to live, it will always come down to money - gated community or not. Here in Vegas there are tons of gated communities and I have to giggle at most of them because it gives a false sense of security. A lot of these communities have entrances without a guard so people will just wait until someone lets them in (if they don't know the key code). Many of these communities have their gates open till lets say 7 PM, now what kind of "secure" development is this if anyone can come and go as they please???
People can have a sense of fear regardless of where they live. I grew up in a very small town where everyone knew everyone. For example I cracked my head open and my dad rushed me to the ER where the on-call doctor was also part of the team who delivered me. We never locked the front door to the house and keys were always left in the ignition in the driveway. There was never a feeling that anything bad would happen. When I was a teenager we moved to a suburb of San Francisco and we had to change our outlook on security. We still lived in a relatively safe area but there wasn't that feeling of complete security.
I don't think that race has anything to do with the "fear" people have about their "safe zone". I'm tired of people always blaming something on someone who they feel is a lesser person because of what that person's background is. Racism will never go away if people constantly bring it up. Crime happens everywhere including in areas that are predominantly the same background of people.
The paragraph on minority groups (page 363) was interesting. I did have to giggle though because she talks about minorities never being able to block out the dominant culture. I found that interesting because in a recent poll, minorites are now the majority. That just goes to show that they are now the dominant culture and they got past the "block".
7 comments:
Hi Frances
Since you live in Vegas, I'd be interested on your thoughts that a portion of the essay 'provoked with me. This notion Bickford argues, that of "purifying" public space in the end it closes us off from uncertainty, "danger" and whatnot really bothered me. For example, I live in a relatively small town in Oklahoma where our sole means of theatrical movie viewing is housed at the local mall. Arguably there isn't a lot for kids to do here, and as a result they roam the mall for entertainment and, well, act like teenagers. And the concept of rowdy teenagers and eight bucks for a movie ticket isn't my ideal combination. So I would be all for a little purification of my movie watching experience in that sense. But back to Vegas - I visited your fair city earlier in this decade with several of my college friends as a boys weekend. We had all graduated, many of us married and with kids - myself included. All I could think about as I walked the strip and was handed leaflet after leaflet advertising "escorts" was there is no way on Earth I would ever take my daughter here. This is one of the unfortunate consequences of allowing perceived "dangers" that Bickford glosses over.
Bickford does treat the gated community as if it was an impregnable fortress. If that were true, the crime rate in all these communities would be zero and everyone would want to live in one. As I read her describe the gated communities I flashed back to the movie The Shawshank Redemption (1994). One of the underlying themes in the movie is that a person learns to need the walls that bind. In the process, a person then becomes institutionalized and cannot function outside of the prison. The movie provides an eerie parallel with the essay. Does Bickford mean to say that our current constructed spaces institutionalize us so much that we are in fact unable to function outside of them? Maybe this would be true for a recluse, but not for the larger majority of people.
Speaking strictly from a masterplan design standpoint, one semi-alternative to walls and gates that I've noticed with curiosity in Charlotte is the idea of neighborhoods with no outlet streets (i.e., one way in, and the same way back out...all of the internal streets ultimately lead nowhere). I believe the city took steps recently to curtail this kind of development, so that future developments actually have to have routes leading all the way through. But living in an older neighborhood that is immune to this requirement, we do notice substantially less traffic, crime and other problems, without the need for physical gates. It seems if you only give drivers one way in and one way out of a neighborhood, that becomes almost a natural wall...
This question of fear is fascinating to me. It's rarely empirical, and almost always attitudinal. For instance, you talked about growing up in a place where you left the house unlocked and the keys in the car, but then you moved to a suburb of SF (which you call "a relatively safe area") and felt that you had to take precautions. On what grounds did your family believe that? Last month, some friends of mine from Vermont visited Manhattan with me for the first time. They didn't know what to do with their backpacks, because they'd been told that if you're carrying a visible bag or purse in New York, you'll almost certainly be mugged. The fact is that street life in NYC is enormously safe because there are jillions of people around (what Jane Jacobs calls "eyes on the street").
The comment about people of color never being able to block out the dominant culture has little to do with demographic ratios. For instance, look at your cable tv station listings. You might find one channel that presumes its viewership is black (BET), and one channel that presumes its viewership is Latino (Univision), and 814 channels that are pretty darn white. So if you're a person of color watching television, you're going to be immersed in "white middle-class culture" (as diverse and broad as that may be), whereas whites can watch television for weeks without seeing black or Latino culture at the center of any of the shows we watch.
Finally, as for the "escort" leaflets on the Strip... I've found that even lowlifes have some social constraints, and would be pretty unlikely to offer such fliers to you if you were accompanied by your partner or kids. I've been in public parks with a fair number of drug dealers around, and they never bother the kids on the adjacent play equipment (in part because six-year-olds are poor customer prospects, and in part because they know that if they approach someone who doesn't want to be approached, they'll become more visible and more likely to be arrested). So in a way, Eric, you and your friends represented the primary target audience for escort leafletting -- a group of middle-aged men clearly having a "boys' weekend" -- and it's no surprise that you received those ads, just as it's no surprise that you see ads for beer and pickup trucks on football broadcasts. If you took your daughter to Las Vegas, I bet you'd never see a single one of them.
Herb, I have to whole heartedly disagree with you - even though I need to expand on the story a bit. I agree that we were targeted as the key demographic and agree that certainly my daughter would be targeting by the marketing campaign, but I guess I was most appalled on one of our morning strolls. As we left the hotel to head for breakfast (not an early rise by any means) said leaflets absolutely littered the streets. I can't imagine having to explain why there are nude women's pictures on the public way to my daughter.
Or how about another example closer to our soon be to home base. I went to undergraduate school in Boston and one of the pleasures of college life was the walk across the Mass Ave bridge into Boston, stop a Crossroads bar for a drink or two, and then head over to Tower Records and grab a CD. I have no idea if its there now, but just to the east of Tower on Mass Ave there used to be "Sweet and Nasty's Adult Confections" with window displays that made even us twenty somethings blush. Shouldn't we have at least some expectations that we can window shop and enjoy the public realm without having to explain to our children the phallus shaped cake in the window?
Hi Frances,
I too had similar experiences in regards to security and moving when I was younger and I also have similar thoughts about racism. Be it our upbringing or not, I find it interesting.
Gates are around communities create a false sense of security. If someone really wants to get in, they will (i.e., Trojan horse). I see gated communities being desired as more of a class/importance symbol myself. The whole gate and wall thing is just a false façade to make people feel important and to make others think they’re important. My equation to this is as follows:
President of the USA = important = need of security
Average middle-class home owner = unimportant = need of security to create importance = gated community
In regards to Bickford’s comments on people surrounding themselves with like people due to race, I find it insulting. First of all, I would never think of another 28 year old, Caucasian, middle-classed, female as being “like” me. It could be because I would like to think I’m one of a kind, or it could be because my appearance tells you ONE thing about me, not the whole story. I am a person, and people are made of many qualities good and bad. Yes, appearance is one of them, but what about character, respect, personality, experiences, knowledge, etc. I would rather purchase a home in a community of hard-working respectable Hispanics than crystal-meth dealer Caucasians any day. My point is to get race out of the equation, bottom-line it is about people.
Hey there Frances...
great take on the Brickford reading... Herb's blog is a running blog and there are many comments from previous cohorts. It may be interesting to look back at those commets and follow some of the other blogs... anyways...
I am part of the first cohort and from Las Vegas... it is nice to have another Sin City resident in Boston to help represent. Did you graduate from UNLV? I was an Arch. student there from 95-2000
I have a redeye into Boston arriving at 8am Saturday.. and from experiance.. I bet you do as well. I will be flying in on US Airways and if you want I could help with the airport to Midtown exchange...
let me know...
http://kab-3-thesis.blogspot.com/
http://bac-faqs.blogspot.com/
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