Anneli Xie
Prof. Susan Ellison
ANTH 231: Anthropology In/Of the City
2020/03/30
Prof. Susan Ellison
ANTH 231: Anthropology In/Of the City
2020/03/30
The Power of Design: Obstructing and Constructing Urban Fear and Community
That our surroundings have the
power to guide our actions and behavior come as no surprise, but to what
extent? With infrastructure, architecture, and design all having the power to
engulf us – making us un-aware of their megalomaniac presence – buildings, public
spaces, and other urban systems often work together to subconsciously promote
or prevent certain behaviors. Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon
remains a remarkable example of the powerful social impact of design, (Foucault 2008, 6) the design of the exam
lines in Shenzhen during the SARS outbreak, as described by Katherine A. Mason,
exemplifies how design can trigger long-lasting emotions, (Mason 2002, 122-123) and urbanists such as Jan
Gehl and Charles Montgomery continuously emphasize how important the design of
infrastructure is in the making of our daily actions and decisions. In the midst of this
intricate dance of urban life, encompassing individuals and their socio-spatial
surroundings, the issue of security and community rests at the forefront. The
desire to live in a safe area has long been emphasized by designers, planners, and
consumers alike, but what encompasses a safe neighborhood remains contestable. Following
the writings of Jane Jacobs, Setha M. Low, and Kelly Anderson, this paper aims
to investigate how the design of infrastructure has the power to both obstruct
and construct human behaviors by examining different approaches in planning,
architecture, and urban design in lessening urban fear and promoting a sense of
safety and community.
The ideal city differs for all. For Jane Jacobs, civil rights activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the ideal city was unplanned, improvised, and democratic. Analyzing and describing her own neighborhood, East Village in New York City, Jacobs wrote of a city with constant movement of people in mixed-use neighborhoods, providing “eyes on the street,” (Jacobs 1961, 35) which she said increased neighborhood safety. Continuing to look at the plan of East Village, Jacobs suggested that maintaining the security of the city is the principal job of the streets and sidewalks, explaining their importance for facilitating interactions, building social relationships, and creating a sense of security through informal surveillance. An increase in social interactions, as well as strengthened social cohesion, can be facilitated by design: having several intersections and corners would increase the probability of human interaction, which could make strangers turn into acquaintances and thus inspire social cohesion and community; installing bright street lights “offer to some people who need to go out on the sidewalk, or would like to, but lacking the good light would not do so;” (Jacobs 1961, 42) and designing buildings to overlook the sidewalk would make people aware of, and ready to, assist in cases of danger on the streets.
Jacobs writings about the vibrant city and its diverse community still circulate amongst urbanists and planners, almost 60 years after the release of her book. Yet, things look much different today; instead of participating in public life, many Americans have retreated to suburbia and its fortified enclaves, uncovered by Setha M. Low in Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. Low describes these gated communities as being physically enclosed by barriers such as “walls, fences, or earth banks,”(Low 2003, 11) with the varying degrees of (im)permeability creating boundaries that enforce segregation by strict internal control. Designed to be safe, gated communities are antagonistic to Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” in several ways, despite responding to the same issue of urban fear. The materiality of these suburban forms both create and re-perpetuate fragmented forms of citizenship, all of which “have social and psychological as well as physical effects.” (Low 2003, 12) Often, these material forms are based on the moral values of those who desire to reside within them, as suggested by Low in her essay “Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness.” As Low explains, “niceness is about keeping things clean, orderly, homogenous, and controlled,” (Low 2009, 87) values which are exhibited when looking at the design of fortified enclaves. Since gated communities are often uniform in design, the distinct visual structures – similarity in architectural style and amenities, color scheme, and/or landscaping – will, as Low cites Susan S. Fainstein, “form contours which structure social relations, causing commonalities of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class to assume spatial identities.” (Fainstein 2001, 1) Thus, the sole process of conforming to these design features will produce and reinforce segregation as categories of gender, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, and class become related to a spatial identity that “social groups […] imprint themselves physically on, […] through the formation of communities.” (Fainstein 2001, 1) In many ways, then, gated communities disable the Jacobian possibility of democratic citizenship, as they will fragment the urban environment to signify spatial identity, thus being exclusionary by design.
In many cases, those excluded from democratic citizenship are members of the urban poor, comprised primarily of Latino and Black minorities. Whereas Low writes of the suburban form of this racial exclusion, it is present in urban surroundings, too. In the documentary My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson documents the processes of gentrification in her own neighborhood, Brooklyn, New York, as she watches it transform from a diverse community into a “hip, expensive brand” (Anderson 2012) from the late 1980s into the early 2010s. Whereas Anderson’s depiction of Brooklyn in the 1980s is evocative of Jacobs’ ideal city, being a vibrant borough with bustling streets and a diverse community, this neighborhood character disappears as the years pass by, adopting similar design features as those discussed by Low. Because of the lack of urban sprawl in high-density neighborhoods such as Brooklyn, however, Low’s description of suburban forms of segregation is not entirely pertinent. Instead, My Brooklyn presents a new form of segregation and gating: zoning laws, re-development, and luxury condos. Similar to Low’s argument of spatial identity, Anderson focuses on the Fulton Mall and its reception amongst the Brooklyn public. Despite being the third-most-profitable retail area in New York City, the Fulton Mall is depicted as flying under the radar of many white residents because it caters predominantly to Caribbean and African-American customers. For these social groups, the Fulton Mall is a spatially identifiable place in which they can shop and socialize, but when Anderson asks her white neighbors what they think of the mall, they raise questions of safety, saying they wouldn’t want to be there at night, as well as reject its spatial identity, saying it’s “weird,” or that they simply don’t understand nor utilize the space. (Anderson 2012) These comments are great examples of Low’s comment that “the fear of others […] lead[s] back to the normalization of a White, middle-class […] perspective,” (Low 2009, 90) where niceness is an emphasized socio-spatial moral value that excludes non-white ways of living. In the end of My Brooklyn, city officials decide to tear down the mall in exchange for luxury developments, in hope of re-vitalizing the borough to reflect the white ideals of niceness and order. Despite the city officials’ desire to re-zone Brooklyn because “change is good, for all” (Anderson 2012) the transition is marked by alienation and pain, as Brooklyn’s small business owners and diverse community are priced out of the borough in place of the white “creative class” who can afford it. Thus, similarly to Low’s description of gated communities, the re-design of Brooklyn becomes nothing more than “a strategy for regulating and patrolling the urban poor, comprising predominantly Latino and Black minorities.” (Low 2003, 17)
Whereas we often go through our daily lives unaware of the intentions behind the design that surrounds us, looking at Jane Jacobs, Setha M. Low, and Kelly Anderson’s depictions of segregation in the city provides an insight to how the composition of infrastructure has the power to both obstruct and construct a sense of urban fear and community. By understanding how spatial identities are formed, we can learn how infrastructure can subtly fragment the urban landscape by being segregating in design – as in the distinct features of Low’s gated communities and their urban counterpart seen in My Brooklyn, – but also how it can promote multiculturalism and openness by adopting a more Jacobian design approach. Moving forward, as large parts of the world undergo rapid urbanization, we ought to think carefully about the design, planning, and infrastructure that surrounds us, paying attention to who is granted urban citizenship, who is not, and why. As Jacobs suggests: “when we deal with cities, we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” (Jacobs 1961, 372)
Fainstein, Susan S. The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2002. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. ““Panopticism” from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 2, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 1-12. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252435.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Low, Setha M. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Low, Setha M. “Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness.” Transforming Anthropology,17, no. 2 (October 2009): 79-92. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2009.01047.x.
Mason, Katherine A. “Mobile Migrants, Mobile Germs: Migration, Contagion, and Boundary-Building in Shenzhen, China after SARS.” Medical Anthropology 31, no. 2 (August 2011): 113-131. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2011.610845.
My Brooklyn. Directed by Kelly Anderson. New York: USA, 2012. Streamed on Sakai
The ideal city differs for all. For Jane Jacobs, civil rights activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the ideal city was unplanned, improvised, and democratic. Analyzing and describing her own neighborhood, East Village in New York City, Jacobs wrote of a city with constant movement of people in mixed-use neighborhoods, providing “eyes on the street,” (Jacobs 1961, 35) which she said increased neighborhood safety. Continuing to look at the plan of East Village, Jacobs suggested that maintaining the security of the city is the principal job of the streets and sidewalks, explaining their importance for facilitating interactions, building social relationships, and creating a sense of security through informal surveillance. An increase in social interactions, as well as strengthened social cohesion, can be facilitated by design: having several intersections and corners would increase the probability of human interaction, which could make strangers turn into acquaintances and thus inspire social cohesion and community; installing bright street lights “offer to some people who need to go out on the sidewalk, or would like to, but lacking the good light would not do so;” (Jacobs 1961, 42) and designing buildings to overlook the sidewalk would make people aware of, and ready to, assist in cases of danger on the streets.
Jacobs writings about the vibrant city and its diverse community still circulate amongst urbanists and planners, almost 60 years after the release of her book. Yet, things look much different today; instead of participating in public life, many Americans have retreated to suburbia and its fortified enclaves, uncovered by Setha M. Low in Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. Low describes these gated communities as being physically enclosed by barriers such as “walls, fences, or earth banks,”(Low 2003, 11) with the varying degrees of (im)permeability creating boundaries that enforce segregation by strict internal control. Designed to be safe, gated communities are antagonistic to Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” in several ways, despite responding to the same issue of urban fear. The materiality of these suburban forms both create and re-perpetuate fragmented forms of citizenship, all of which “have social and psychological as well as physical effects.” (Low 2003, 12) Often, these material forms are based on the moral values of those who desire to reside within them, as suggested by Low in her essay “Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness.” As Low explains, “niceness is about keeping things clean, orderly, homogenous, and controlled,” (Low 2009, 87) values which are exhibited when looking at the design of fortified enclaves. Since gated communities are often uniform in design, the distinct visual structures – similarity in architectural style and amenities, color scheme, and/or landscaping – will, as Low cites Susan S. Fainstein, “form contours which structure social relations, causing commonalities of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class to assume spatial identities.” (Fainstein 2001, 1) Thus, the sole process of conforming to these design features will produce and reinforce segregation as categories of gender, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, and class become related to a spatial identity that “social groups […] imprint themselves physically on, […] through the formation of communities.” (Fainstein 2001, 1) In many ways, then, gated communities disable the Jacobian possibility of democratic citizenship, as they will fragment the urban environment to signify spatial identity, thus being exclusionary by design.
In many cases, those excluded from democratic citizenship are members of the urban poor, comprised primarily of Latino and Black minorities. Whereas Low writes of the suburban form of this racial exclusion, it is present in urban surroundings, too. In the documentary My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson documents the processes of gentrification in her own neighborhood, Brooklyn, New York, as she watches it transform from a diverse community into a “hip, expensive brand” (Anderson 2012) from the late 1980s into the early 2010s. Whereas Anderson’s depiction of Brooklyn in the 1980s is evocative of Jacobs’ ideal city, being a vibrant borough with bustling streets and a diverse community, this neighborhood character disappears as the years pass by, adopting similar design features as those discussed by Low. Because of the lack of urban sprawl in high-density neighborhoods such as Brooklyn, however, Low’s description of suburban forms of segregation is not entirely pertinent. Instead, My Brooklyn presents a new form of segregation and gating: zoning laws, re-development, and luxury condos. Similar to Low’s argument of spatial identity, Anderson focuses on the Fulton Mall and its reception amongst the Brooklyn public. Despite being the third-most-profitable retail area in New York City, the Fulton Mall is depicted as flying under the radar of many white residents because it caters predominantly to Caribbean and African-American customers. For these social groups, the Fulton Mall is a spatially identifiable place in which they can shop and socialize, but when Anderson asks her white neighbors what they think of the mall, they raise questions of safety, saying they wouldn’t want to be there at night, as well as reject its spatial identity, saying it’s “weird,” or that they simply don’t understand nor utilize the space. (Anderson 2012) These comments are great examples of Low’s comment that “the fear of others […] lead[s] back to the normalization of a White, middle-class […] perspective,” (Low 2009, 90) where niceness is an emphasized socio-spatial moral value that excludes non-white ways of living. In the end of My Brooklyn, city officials decide to tear down the mall in exchange for luxury developments, in hope of re-vitalizing the borough to reflect the white ideals of niceness and order. Despite the city officials’ desire to re-zone Brooklyn because “change is good, for all” (Anderson 2012) the transition is marked by alienation and pain, as Brooklyn’s small business owners and diverse community are priced out of the borough in place of the white “creative class” who can afford it. Thus, similarly to Low’s description of gated communities, the re-design of Brooklyn becomes nothing more than “a strategy for regulating and patrolling the urban poor, comprising predominantly Latino and Black minorities.” (Low 2003, 17)
Whereas we often go through our daily lives unaware of the intentions behind the design that surrounds us, looking at Jane Jacobs, Setha M. Low, and Kelly Anderson’s depictions of segregation in the city provides an insight to how the composition of infrastructure has the power to both obstruct and construct a sense of urban fear and community. By understanding how spatial identities are formed, we can learn how infrastructure can subtly fragment the urban landscape by being segregating in design – as in the distinct features of Low’s gated communities and their urban counterpart seen in My Brooklyn, – but also how it can promote multiculturalism and openness by adopting a more Jacobian design approach. Moving forward, as large parts of the world undergo rapid urbanization, we ought to think carefully about the design, planning, and infrastructure that surrounds us, paying attention to who is granted urban citizenship, who is not, and why. As Jacobs suggests: “when we deal with cities, we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” (Jacobs 1961, 372)
References
Fainstein, Susan S. The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2002. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. ““Panopticism” from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 2, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 1-12. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252435.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Low, Setha M. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Low, Setha M. “Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness.” Transforming Anthropology,17, no. 2 (October 2009): 79-92. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2009.01047.x.
Mason, Katherine A. “Mobile Migrants, Mobile Germs: Migration, Contagion, and Boundary-Building in Shenzhen, China after SARS.” Medical Anthropology 31, no. 2 (August 2011): 113-131. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2011.610845.
My Brooklyn. Directed by Kelly Anderson. New York: USA, 2012. Streamed on Sakai