The heights of irony: protecting our children in a "ClusterF**k Nation"

There was recently an interesting article on anti-urban media bias from Greater Greater Washington, a blog focusing on urbanism in Washington DC. Dissecting the Washington Post coverage of Fairfax County Virginia's proposed incorporation as a city, the blog emphasizes how the article's authors repeatedly use codewords for city such as "blight" and "crime". Furthermore, they revealed their biases in an illustration of the difference between a city and a county through an explanation

"which juxtaposes suburbs ‘where Washington goes to walk the dog and water the lawn’ with something ‘many have tried to avoid: high-rise offices, blight, crime and housing that's more likely to have a balcony than a back yard.’"

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While this is an egregious and perhaps malicious example of anti-urbanism in reporting, many other examples can stem from overly sensational reporting or from the natural biases caused by a set lifestyle. For example, since reporters presumably represent an average cross-section of the american population, it is not unreasonable to assume that few reporters walk or bike to work. Thus, the act of driving colors their view of the world and that coloration inevitably seeps into their writing.

There are, however, some stories that are so ridiculous as to overwhelm whatever personal urban or anti-urban bias a reporter might have. The events of May 15th in Saratoga Springs, New York are one such event. Andrew J. Bernstein reports the events occurring on National Bike to Work Day:

Janette Kaddo Marino and her son, Adam, 12, wanted to participate in the commuting event, so the two set off to Maple Avenue Middle School on bicycles May 15. The two pedaled the 7 miles from their east side home, riding along a path that extends north from North Broadway straight onto school property.

After they arrived, mother and son were approached first by school security and then school administrators, who informed Marino that students are not permitted to ride their bikes to school.

“Unbeknownst to us there is a policy,” she said, “but it wasn’t in any of the brochures given to us.”

School officials took her son’s bike and stored it in the boiler room. They told her she would have to return with a car to retrieve the bike later in the day.

I will ignore the possible legal ramifications of illegal seizure of private property and examine the school environment. Maple Avenue Middle School, like the vast majority of educational facilities in the country, is built on the periphery of Saratoga Springs. While this location presumably made consolidation easier and facilitated a larger athletic complex, it put it out of easy reach for the majority of students.


Maple Avenue Middle School in relation to Saratoga Springs.
View Larger Map

Maple Avenue Middle School aerial.

The school was built in 1992 on busy US Route 9 (Maple Avenue--bucolic in name only) to facilitate bussing students not only from the city, but from the suburban developments ringing the former resort town. Two years after the school was built the school district issued Transportation policy No. 741 forbidding students to ride or walk to the school.

The school was designed to accommodate 1,800 students (in a middle school-- that averages to around six hundred students per grade!) divided into four sub-sections, each named for one of the Saratoga Springs Lakes. The school, from the aerial is all but indistinguishable from a minimum security prison and the urban design reinforces the idea of containment. There is no clear path to the entrance and the school sits nearly a hundred feet back from the road behind parking lots. Route 9 is atypical of high-traffic rural routes, despite being an undivided two way road, it does have ample shoulder room at least a lane wide. This is immaterial however, the route Mrs. Marino and her son took was on a quiet neighboring street that dead-ends into the school property.

The principal, one Stuart Byrne, explained that the prohibition on self-transportation to school is, of course, designed to protect students:

“I would be a nervous wreck every day if kids were riding to school,” he said. “Traffic isn’t bumper to bumper, but it’s non-stop. He said the district’s policy does not allow students to ride or walk to schools outside of the city’s urban core.

While traffic is one concern, Byrne said he also worries about children traveling unsupervised through the community. He noted that students are under school supervision until they are dropped off by the bus or picked up at the end of the day.

“If you look at the North Broadway route that the parent used that day: (Even if) there were going to be some exceptions or monitoring (to allow riding to school), you’re still going into a substantially wooded area,” he said. “I don’t know how you say to the community at large that is a safe area.”

In one statement the principal has raised every parental boogeyman from traffic accidents and abduction to fear of the wild to substantiate the need for continuous monitoring and control.

Of course, the public health implications of policies that prohibit walking and riding are not considered. According to Dr. Richard Jackson, one third of children born in the past year will contract Type II Diabetes if current trends continue. The Centers for Disease Control just reported that the rate of clinical obesity in adults in the United States has hit an all-time high: 26.1 %. Type II Diabetes causes an average of a 15 year reduction in life span and considerable related health problems. Today diabetes costs the US medical system $218 billion dollars annually. If Jackson's prognostication holds true that cost will rise by one hundred and fifty times by 2059 to $32,700,000,000,000. Can our nation afford that cost?

There is a solution. Jackson points out that walking more than 10,000 steps a day (roughly 4 miles) helps diabetics control blood glucose levels and prevents the onset of Type II diabetes.

This brings us back to upstate New York and Maple Avenue Middle School. While nearly 60% of students walked to school in 1973, now only 13% do. Undoubtedly, while many children can no longer walk or bike to school due to ill-conceived sprawling and car-oriented communities and the growing trend of school consolidation, it is also worth asking whether misguided policies shaped by our overly-litigious society and over protective attitudes prevent another segment of the school-age population from living a more healthy way of life.

Mrs. Marino has not given up. She has biked with her son several times and, as of 9 June was petitioning the school district to join the Safe Routes to School Program.



The ironies to this story are many. To begin with, the photograph above shows that, despite Transportation policy No. 741, there is clearly a crosswalk in front of the school that appears to connect to a well used path. Whether a cross-walk on a two lane country road without a traffic light or a stop sign is an invitation to frogger is an open question. Secondly, Kaid Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that Saratoga Springs was commended only a week ago by Business Week for being an "anti-suburbia" where "you can walk to work and shopping".

In a greater irony Saratoga Springs is, of course, the chosen home of anti-sprawl post-peak oil zealot James Howard Kunstler. [As a side comment I have always wondered how he rationalizes living in a town of 28,500 with a tourist-based economy that will inevitably be disconnected from all markets and even workshop-based industry if the future is as dire as he predicts.] In any case, Kunstler has yet to acknowledge the story brewing in his own backyard.

Playgrounds for the Lawrence Welk Set?

I recently stumbled across an article detailing new playgrounds in Germany specifically created for senior citizens (or at least older adults seeing as the low age of the spectrum is 60). Now, as regular readers might note, this particular blogger firmly believes that play, like learning must be a lifelong process. [Of course true play itself is a form of learning through the construction of simulated reality and/or exploration of boundaries...]

That being stated I have some major reservations about this kind of application. The logic being used to justify such a segregated space is bluntly put:

“Retired people need a space to be themselves without someone coming along and spilling ice-cream on their trousers or breakdancing,” said Andrea Weber, a social worker specialising in the lifestyle of the elderly. “They need to feel safe.”

While I understand that, in most cases, the aging process leads to a lack of flexibility and increased apprehension of danger (some might term that wisdom) I do not believe that it is healthy as a society to create a safe place for our elders by separating them from "our" public spaces. Ironically, by creating public space that effectively ‘wharehouses’ seniors, one might actually be creating the potential for much more crime given the alarming rates at which seniors are preyed upon.

To take another tack, I might guess that a majority of our population remembers fond interactions with senior citizens in our youth. My father still remembers fondly (by name even) the old italian guys that lived in his building and on his block half a century ago. If we consider such classic public spaces as Washington Square in New York we encounter a mix of demographics ranging from the elderly talking or playing chess to the young splashing in fountains and chasing pigeons. I am not a psychologist or sociologist by any means, but I will argue that such intergenerational and cross-demographic contact both helps social cohesiveness and fosters responsibility to others in society. Finally, I have noticed that when seniors get very old (beyond the point of any sustained exertion) they often find great comfort in simply observing life around them. Shortly before my grandfather died from heart failure he would find what appeared to be great pleasure simply sitting on the couch and watching three generations of his family swirl around him. Although I cannot put myself in his place, I can understand how gratifying that might be after almost a century of life.

If places for senior citizen recreation are designed as discreet nodes I feel it is this connection that will be lost. After all, after many decades of life would you rather spend your time with your extended family and friends or with those who coincidentally were born around the same time you were?

Architecture (establishment) as totalitarian dystopia

I've been busy with a lot of petty annoyances (more on that in a future post) and projects, so I just ran across a fascinating part by part comparison of the architectural establishment and Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Leave it to Norman Blogster over at Part IV to break it down like this:

“‘The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.’

Orwell divides society into three segments - the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Proletariat. The Inner and Outer Circles are different levels of membership of the Party. The Party is quite clearly the architectural establishment, not the RIBA as you might think. The following quotes are taken from Part 1, Chapter 7.

‘Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting...’

You can think of the proles as the general public - those who are unfettered by the brainwashing of architectural education:

‘...the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance... To keep them in control was not difficult.’

The Outer Circle are the architects and the students of architecture. They tow the Party line, not really questioning why, just happy to be members in a privileged position (last paragraph of Part2, Chapter 5):

‘In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing... Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.’

Finally, the Inner Circle. This is where the real power lies and is composed of the starchitects, the architectural press, the RIBA (FAIA) and the architectural academics. There is an implicit agreement between this set who direct the Party.
In 1984, we learn most about the Inner Circle and its relation to the Outer Circle when the hero Winston Smith starts to read a smuggled copy of "The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism" - the book of the Party. It's online here. I'm quoting from Chapter III - War and Peace:

‘In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'’

...and...

‘War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war... In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.’

It is this inert orthodoxy of power and intellectual control that causes those outside the status quo to either lose faith and crumble or, otherwise, become ridiculous characters of themselves through their advocacy of their own position. I was present at a lecture recently by one of these "outsider" thinkers who was hellbent on convincing everybody that his position was the way of the future. After the lecture finally ended somewhere past the three hour mark an influential member of the audience was heard to comment "the longer he tried to convince us of his intelligence, the less I believed it." If unyielding self-advocacy becomes a parody then how is one to fight the entrenched mass of the overlords establishment?


That is a question I may address in the future, but until then I remain open to suggestions.


Read more here:
Part I: The Party
Part II: Doublethink and Duckspeak
Part III: Hate Week, Hangings and More

On the subject of torture...

Time I weighed in on the political events of last week:

Back in 1996, a vote for the War Crimes Act, which passed both houses with overwhelming support, could have been considered a vote for the U.S. to follow the Geneva Conventions to the letter. When a House Judiciary Committee panel first considered the War Crimes Act in June 1996, John McNeil, then a senior deputy counsel at the Department of Defense, testified that the bill was "an opportunity for members of Congress to endorse the idea that the United States, as a political matter, should be seen as fully in conformity with its international obligations in this very sensitive area."

But at the time Republicans were really focused on making sure U.S. courts would be able to prosecute war crimes committed against American citizens, not by them. Inhofe took to the Senate floor that August to say the War Crimes Act would protect "our young troops" in the event "a crime is perpetrated against them."

It was unthinkable back then that it might be the United States that was systematically violating the Geneva Conventions. "There was never any hint or clue that this might be applied to us," stated Gary Solis, an expert on the law of war at Georgetown University. Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, explained, "No one ever questioned that the U.S. would comply with the full range of the Geneva Conventions obligations."

That is, no one doubted the U.S. would comply until early this month...

So, therefore, when being part of the international community will help protect the lives of our soldiers the Geneva Convention is our friend, but when we are busy killing our own troops through incompetence and negligence and we justify torture as being a good PR tool that will help Joe Sixpack wrongly believe that the actions of this administration (and its war on a philosophical construct) have made us safer, then it is perfectly acceptable to pull a bigger about face than Lieutenant Kerry ever perpetrated.

Torture, as so many have noted, is simply in the worst interests for our country by not only inspiring (and rightly so) hatred around the world, but by also empowering out darkest motivations:

Granted such liberty in dealing with prisoners, some officers started to enjoy themselves. They made up games, forcing prisoners to dance, smearing glue on their heads, stripping them naked, pouring frigid water over them. Sometimes guards had too much fun and a prisoner died. Then prison-appointed doctors, who often participated in the interrogations, wrote up fictive autopsy reports.

America?
No. This passage describes Soviet Gulags.

Taken from an interview in Harper's historian Kate brown notes that

Declassified FBI and U.S. Army files detailing abuses of detainees in U.S. detention centers uncannily echo Soviet NKVD reports. They recount late-night roundups of civilians and describe prisoners held in chambers of extreme heat or cold, chained naked to the floor without food and water for days on end, defecating on themselves, beaten (some to death), forced to dance, to lick their shoes and body parts, to crawl around, and to bark like dogs. American doctors and psychiatrists helped devise methods of inflicting pain and fear to elicit confessions, and they signed false reports when detainees died in custody.

Frightening.

But as Paul Rieckhoff (an infantry officer who served in Iraq) explains the new stance on terror has soldiers, well, terrified:

IN 2002, I attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Ga. At “the Schoolhouse,” every new Army infantry officer spent six months studying the basics of his craft, including the rules of war.

I remember a seasoned senior officer explaining the importance of the Geneva Conventions. He said, “When an enemy fighter knows he’ll be treated well by United States forces if he is captured, he is more likely to give up.”

A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency.

But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week...

But the fight over Article 3 concerns not only Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq. It also affects future wars, because when we lower the bar for the treatment of our prisoners, other countries feel justified in doing the same. Four years ago in Liberia, in an attempt to preserve his corrupt authority, President Charles Taylor adopted the Bush administration’s phrase “unlawful combatants” to describe prisoners he wished to try outside of civilian courts. Today Mr. Taylor stands before The Hague accused of war crimes.

via Adam Ash
More in the LA Times

But what do I know?
I'm just a useless architecture student not an omnipotent congressman...

...and we must be safer sine we red-stamped torture last week because today liquids have been allowed back on planes

An Open Letter Concerning Play

Sir - As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions. We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development.

Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs. However, it’s now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people.

This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, but a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being. We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.
(emphasis added)
- Letter to the Daily Telegraph (and response here)

Perhaps it is time we not only address the welfare of our children, but also of ourselves. When is the last time you engaged in an activity not related to work, school, socialization with the opposite sex (or same for those of you who swing that way), or personal gain? Oops.. too late

It appears I'm too late on this one too

I feel that architects, especially academics and students, are at the greatest risk as we are all rallying under the same deluded masochistic banner of production; it might be curious to ask how many times did the person with the better project lose to the one who spent 86 sleepless hours working on theirs? Very rarely does this happen in my experience because the one who spent endless hours throwing together pieces of cardboard and hoping the form looks good are far less invested in their design then those who approach it from a philosophical and/or intellectual framework. Architecture is of the world and we need to experience it in its fullness so that we may adequately design for it instead of just sexing up form in the solitary confinement of our studios.

Play is immersion, training, understanding, action, and so much more that adds up to the common denominator of life.

reawakening: ending dreaming through experience of reality

Evan at Tenuous Resilience recently had a post that caused me to reflect further on a number of issues and perhaps reconsider subcultural praxis. Evan wrote that, in his experience, the most engaging fragments of architecture are the ones that are considered the most dangerous from a conventional viewpoint.

He continues:
"So, what is the essence of this problem? Is the US legal system so rife with frivolous lawsuits that building codes must comply to ridiculous standards that forsake any possibility of personal responsibility? Is the protection of our populous so important to our policymakers that we must eliminate every possible source of harm? What happened to the America that was wild and exciting, where anyone could strive for their dreams or die trying, where the very real possibility of failure made the win that much richer? How did we become a nation of frightened hermits, isolated in our armored cul-de-sacs and SUVs? What happened to ambition? Where are the foolhardy?

I think the illusion of safety perpetuated by building codes, warning labels, commercial drugs, and the security-obsessed government is killing our national spirit... Despite the state of the middle east, the American people have not been asked to make any sacrifices, and though we are a "nation at war" you certainly can't tell by the home front. Would a "Manhattan"-scale project for sustainable, green power be enough to wean our economy from unstable foreign oil? Perhaps more importantly, who would benefit from such a project?"

I would first like to address the dialectical relationship between control (vis-a-vis safety codification) and responsibility. This happens to be the one point that I can agree on with my friends who also happen to be professed anarchists. While I hold deep reservations (stemming from my Conrad/Golding influenced conception of human nature) about the human repercussions of abandoning codified strictures of behavior, I will readily admit that too much control yields an immature and potentially irresponsible citizen.

The more that the dangers of the world are kept at arm's length, the more people slip into a protracted state of infantilism. This trend has dire repercussions for the future as it has in the past; as Evan alluded, our current war is essentially a war by proxy for there is no reciprocal war on the homefront. Currently in Iraq the proportion of mercenaries to soldiers and official government representatives is 1:6. Not unlike the end centuries of Rome when the legions were staffed with the same barbarians who would shortly sack the eternal city, (their salaries paid by rich senators who disdained the risk of battle) this phenomena will only grow more severe in the coming years. This unfortunately is a self perpetuating cycle; as we continue to wage wars and inflect misery around the globe without any meaningful correlation at home, we, as a population, can easily forget the devastation occurring far away and can become distracted by Bennifer, TomKat or whatever other trifling matter grabs headlines and seizes our collective (un)conscious.

Our utter disconnection and distraction will only serve to get us more embroiled as we fail to fulfill our role by asking difficult questions of our leaders. Furthermore, as other peoples see our inability to concentrate on what our very own government (or elite) is perpetrating, our problems will only worsen. Could it not be argued that the strictures, rules, and codes that protect us ourselves, and by extension, the pain of life can be understood not only to maintain, but to enhance the status quo by allowing us to be distracted by our bread and circuses?

There is a fascinating inversion to the menace of complacency brought about by the metastasizing illusion of safety and all-consuming desire for this chimera that occurs primarily on a subcultural level; as our species has dealt more or less successfully with danger for millennia a need for it has become ingrained in our psyche. Such subcultural phenomena as ultimate fighting or even extreme sports (although at this point their ability to generate profit seems to have made them defacto cultural components of the status quo) exist to fulfill the basic need for danger vis-a-vis the "rush" or adrenaline high generated as a protective impulse due to extreme stress.

In addition to the segment of pure adrenaline junkies there is a large proportion of seemingly rational people who place themselves in harm's way simply for the emotional and mental immediacy generated through such an action. I have heard climbers describe that the joy they get from conquering a vertical cliff face stems from the complete mental focus and utter lucidity they experience as they contemplate where to find safe handholds. I can personally attest that the experience of having to vault off of a impassable catwalk to the flange of a rusted generator thirty feet above the floor in a derelict power station cut like a hot knife through the butter of the fog of everyday life. Before I ramble on for too long I would like to close with a question: if we agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, can we also posit that a life safe from harm and challenge is not a life at all?

I referenced it in the last post, but this is cool!

Commissioned for the 2006 Kwangju Biannale in South Korea, this map traces the myriad threads that link the United States, a myriad of private military contractors (PMC's), and the countries of Columbia and Iraq. (Currently 1 in 6 personnel in Iraq are private contractors) We certainly are living in the age of mercenary war, when
"The coalition of the willing has become the coalition of the billing"

This definitely has serious implications for the future of the Geneva convention as well as the future and viability of State actors in the face of a dominating majority of loyalty-impaired private forces.

Full Image here (50'x9')

via Critical Spatial Practice

The New Cityscape of Fear [via Salon]

With the 5th anniversary of 9/11 looming upon us, Salon has begun a series if articles reflecting on the changes that have overtaken the nation. Farhad Manjoo delineates the intense spatial change as the "Cityscape of Fear". Jersey Barriers, Bollards, and French Barriers-cum-Lousy Bikeracks are everywhere defending even the most unlikely of targets. Manjoo references Paul Goldberger's observation that in the past

" ..you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that's nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm."

Interestingly enough, the article points out that Jersey Barriers are actually the urban structural interventionist equivalent of plastic sheets and duck tape because

"The barriers, which were designed as lane separators by New Jersey's state Highway Authority in 1955, are intended to be placed on roads parallel to the direction in which cars are traveling. A vehicle that nudges too close to the barrier will ride up its tapered edge and slide back onto the road, suffering minimal damage. But placed the opposite way -- in front of a building to protect against oncoming attack -- a Jersey barrier is no match for a fast car or truck. In crash tests, speeding vehicles that hit the barriers at obtuse angles simply knock them over or vault over them straight at the target."

Given this revelation we must stop and consider how many extremely inconvenient security measures are simply in place to convey an appearance of protection, or perhaps more darkly, to circumvent traditional freedoms with greater control. After all, we are currently at war (no, not that one... and that one is technically our weapons, not our war). No the earlier war, the Long War, you know the war against the intangible act? Well, seeing the smashing success we had the LAST time we tried that we should redouble advocacy for intelligent safety solutions rather than half measures that compromise safety through false security while depriving us of the communal life we have more or less enjoyed for 230 years.

On Parks and Public Space [in progress]

Note: what follows are some current fulminations on the nature, identity, and purpose of parks and public space. It is still very rough, so if anyone would like to contribute either advice or scholarly resources, please do in the comment section.

Two days ago, as I prepared for my entrance into graduate school, I finished up my advising review and stepped outside. It was an overcast day, but there was a breeze and the temperature was mercifully hovering around 65º as opposed to the eighty degree days with brutal humidity that I have become accustomed to since moving out here. I had a few hours to kill before my next appointment, so I decided to take advantage of my last free day before voluntary M.Arch imprisonment and take a ride through Forest Park.

For those unfamiliar with Forest Park it opened in 1876, and can be seen from a height of 28 miles (thanks GoogleEarth!). A portion of it was borrowed for the 1904 World's Fair (which also included the campus of Washington University and the ever-so-ethnically sensitive named area that would become Dogtown) and, despite incursions and subsequent development of a highway, a surface metro line, a science museum, and a parkway, it still remains 1.4 times bigger than Olmstead's Central Park. I decided to ride the perimeter trail which is about 6 miles in length. After my ride I came to two conclusions: firstly (full disclosure here) I am way out of shape. Recently the sum total of my riding has been more or less to school and back; in my undergrad days that did mean conquering a 8 block long steep hill on the way home (really fun when you haven't slept in 37 hours I can assure you!) but here my route is mostly level unlike the picturesque contours of Forest Park.

The second train of thought is more substantive. Is there anything today that can rival the generosity and public benefit brought about by the parks movement in the late nineteenth century?

Obviously the parks movement has much guilt as a result of its association with the picturesque movement and that movement's subsequent corruption by the Jeffersonian/Lockeian ideal of property ownership and "free market" (I use it in quotes as the American market has never really been free -- look into agriculture subsidies if you disagree) into the unstoppable beast of suburbia. If we can set aside this admittedly culturally influential relationship and examine the unprecedented societal benefits brought about by the parks movement it is almost impossible to compare it to any present day phenomena. To use Forest Park as an example, there are not only typical spaces for recreation, contemplation, and socialization, but also three museums (art, history, and science) and a zoo. Both general museums (such as the Missouri History Museum) and science museums, as well as public zoological parks came out of the late-victorian mania for education and classification; these were modern concepts in the era of the park's inception.

There of course is a darker side and inherent contradiction to this seeming beneficence; these public institutions were created to pacify a somewhat rebellious lower class, to educate the torrent of uneducated European immigrants and indoctrinate them as members of an enlightened American populous, and to preserve the status quo from the feared corrosion of radical European movements (marxism et al) and the homegrown threat of unionization as a result of atrocious conditions. Thus, the parks and other public institutions served to an extent as bread and circuses (or almost the spectacle of Debord) but with the crucial distinction that unlike the carnage of Rome, or the empty spectacle/simulacra of the modern age, such institutions responded to a perceived threat by redirecting society in a positive manner toward greater education for all. If I sound less than radical here it is because the society reacting with positivity is most always preferable to the alternative. It seems that we are now fully in the grasp of the alternative; instead of reacting as those fearful Americans of the late nineteenth century did, we cannot even respond to the perceived threat posed by our on children without resorting to militaristic techniques of control.

At this point it might be a good time to consider the words of one of the most prescient minds of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin:

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with that insight."

-Walter Benjamin

"Theses on the Philosophy of History"
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968)

This militarization and transformation into a society of continuous control has momentous implications for all of the design fields. We, as architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, graphic designers, and industrial designers have been given this situation, and we must work constantly and to the best of all our collective abilities to turn these increasingly negative and dangerous responses to the ancient fears of terrorism, cultural difference, political ideology, and race into positive institutions, places, and objects that will contribute meaningfully to the public realm.


Books Cited in this article

The Kids are Alright?? ‘Hanging Out’ as Social Problem [via Spiked]

...
The Local Government Association (LGA) has compiled a list of naff songs for councils to play in trouble spots in order to keep youths at bay – including Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ and St Winifred’s School Choir’s ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ (1). Apparently the Home Office is monitoring the scheme carefully. This policy has been copied from Sydney, where it is known as the ‘Manilow Method’ (after the king of naff, Barry Manilow), and has precursors in what we might call the ‘Mozart Method’, which was first deployed in Canadian train stations and from 2004 onwards was adopted by British shops (such as Co-op) and train stations (such as Tyne and Wear Metro).

Another new technique for dispersing youths is the Mosquito, a machine that emits a high-pitched noise only audible to teenage ears. Adults walk by unmolested, but youngsters apparently find the device unbearable and can’t stand to be near it for long. The Mosquito, currently being trialled in Somerset, makes a noise that carries over 20 metres or so, and which to adults registers as a kind of faint buzz. To people under 20, however, it can be so piercing that they simply cannot remain in earshot. The Mosquito will literally scream children off the streets (2)....

In 2005, several British towns drafted in the army to patrol the streets at night – a senior Ministry of Defence official said the presence of troops would ‘deter bad behaviour’ from youths. Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one Weston police officer (3).

These bizarre attempts at crowd control provide a snapshot of adult unease about young people. Teenagers are treated almost as another species, immune to reasoning and social sanction. Just as cattle are directed with electric shocks, or cats are put off with pepper dust, so teenagers are prodded with Manilow, Mozart or the Mosquito. ‘Make them go away’ is the only thought here... [emphasis added]

(1) Matthew Norman, London Evening Standard, 12 June 2006
(2) A pain in the ear, Brendan O’Neill, New Statesman, 7 August 2006
(3) A pain in the ear, Brendan O’Neill, New Statesman, 7 August 2006

Confinement, Education and the Control Society [via Ideant]

This analysis was, in my opinion, so well done that I have decided to run it in its entirety. Remember to check out the ideant feed.

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"Perhaps it's not surprising that Foucault, the "panopticon guy", is characterized as a thinker of power, discipline, and punishment. But as Deleuze (1995) points out, Foucault also believed that we are increasingly moving away from being societies based on discipline to societies based on control. According to Deleuze's reading of Foucault: "We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication" (1995, p. 174, my emphasis).

Did Foucault prematurely announce the end of confinement? It sure looks like it when looking at the US, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. According to government statistics, the number of people in prison and jail is outpacing the number of inmates released, even while the crime rate continues to fall. By June 2004 there were 2.1 million people in US jails, or one in every 138 residents (ref, ref). Race has everything to do with this issue: "blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested... and 49 percent of those in prison... One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995." (ref).

And that's just at home. The US is also in the business of confining people abroad. According to the article American Gulag in Harper's Sept. 2006 issue, 450 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, approximately 13,000 in Iraq, 500 in Afghanistan, and an estimated 100 in secret CIA "black sites" around the world. They have not been formally charged, and have little legal recourse. In essence, they are guilty until the US decides they are innocent. While the man in charge of the facility "firmly believes" that there are no innocent men in Guantanamo, a report  based on data from the Dept. of Defense indicates that 55% of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its allies (ref, ref). According to Harper's, 98 Guantanamo detainees have died to date, it is safe to assume not from natural causes.

But it's not simply the case that this society is a bit behind in the transition from discipline to control. It is actually advancing equally well on both fronts. In fact, increased control goes hand in hand with increased confinement because increased control means more precise ways of identifying those who fail to perform to society's expectations. In a technocracy, control is surveillance: the continuous monitoring of public, private and work life, and the "intelligent" identification of any deviance. But while new control technologies afford more effective and efficient methods of management and surveillance, you still need an apparatus for controlling those who fall outside the established parameters. This group includes those who have failed in the educational system and therefore cannot productively contribute to the service economy, enemies of the state (preemptively defined), non-conforming minorities, etc. (I'm not suggesting there are no criminals in prison; I'm merely drawing some conclusions from trends in the makeup of the prison population). The trick is then to turn the confinement of these 'burdens' of society into a business opportunity by benefiting from their cheap labor or by privatizing the industry of confinement itself (think Halliburton).

I hinted above at the role of education as a control mechanism that helps differentiate the productive members of society from those who should be confined and disciplined. The fact that the same groups who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population are also those most likely to drop out of the educational system is not a coincidence (only about half of Black and Hispanic youth graduate with a high-school degree; ref). But for everyone else who succeeds, what does education look like? The answer is: continuous control. I was struck by Deleuze's comments regarding the changing nature of education in a control society:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything... school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business. (1995, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on 'life-long' learning. The constant student is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Thanks to distance education, e-learning and technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS), education becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which —more importantly— can be used to monitor performance throughout the 'learning' career of the individual. Thus, assessment-based education helps reconcile control and discipline in society by helping to effect, in the case of those who fail, a transition from controlled subject to disciplined object.

I want to go back briefly to Deleuze's comment about control societies also operating through "instant communication" (1995, p. 174, my emphasis). It would make sense to assume that, in a crude way, control societies would want to control communication. But that is not the case. According to the standard technophile discourse, thanks to technology our societies enjoy an unprecedented freedom of speech and expression. Communication technologies with low operational cost and low barriers of entry (such as blogs) are praised for giving "everyone" a chance to express themselves. But Deleuze points out that "Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves... What we're are plagued by these days isn't any blocking of communication, but pointless statements" (1995, p. 129). Deleuze is suggesting that there is a connection between control and an over-abundance of (meaningless) expression. More of this type of communication has not resulted in stronger social bonds, but in increased isolation: concurrent with advances in ICTs, the last U.S. census shows that 25% of the nation's households (27.2 million) consist of just one person, compared to 10% in 1950 (ref).

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an 'empowering' media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

Offline Reference:
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press."

Books cited in this article: