New York City, a city of Creative Dissonance

New York City, nation’s economic and cultural capital, is well known for its cultural and ethnical diversity: The “Big Apple” is also known as a “Melting Pot”. Not only traditional Immigrants population groups such as, Italian, Irish, and Polish, but also, Hispanic, Latino, Chinese, Indian, Korean and other Asian, have already been settled as a major ethnical population decades ago. Today, nearly 180 languages are spoken within the New York City area and 36% of its population (approximately 2.9 million out of 8 million people) is foreign- born residents.[1] Throughout the history, New York City has always been a city of immigrants. Those poor and discriminated immigrants from all over the world spent their settlement periods in the United States living in densely-packed tenements and row houses. While working their way out from those ghettoes, they left their remarks on New York City near their residential districts. Various ethnic groups have largely represented their cultural communities like Chinatown, Little Italy, and Spanish Harlem. As a result, New York City became as a cultural mecca as it is today. Despite all of the diverse racial populations and various languages spoken, people who live in the New York City believe there is one thing that all of those different people have in common: They are all New Yorkers. From the yuppie Jewish businessperson who works in lower Manhattan to poor Jamaican hip-hop artist live in the Harlem, they are all the ingredients of the stew, known as New York City.

Figure 1. Little Italy, NYC. c. 1900.

However, those ethnical seasonings (the lives of specific individuals or groups and their related public history) gradually dilutes as time goes by. The Harlem, formally a home of African Americans’ heart and soul, has been gentrified, and lost its odor. Now, 125th street became a safe tourists’ attraction. In Manhattan Korea town, generally bordered by 31st and 36th streets and between 5th and 6th avenues, all we can find there now is Korean restaurants and karaoke. Most of the Korean people who used to live there, moved out to Flushing, Queens, Fort Lee, NJ and other adjacent cities. This phenomenon also applies to Little Italy, where former Italian territories had mostly encroached by Chinatown. Yet, Chinese are not the top of food chain. An excessive real-estate bubble of early 2000’s overheated real-estate developers and they started to build luxury condos in adjacent borders between Chinatown and SoHo. The ethnical communities’ histories are depended on how members of a group succeeded in American society and replaced or assimilated by a larger history of how groups survived or failed. In this circumstance, we are confronting a series of social and cultural shifts; therefore, redefining social recognition of ethnic groups and their communities based on approaches to "place" on different scales within urban space are strongly required.




Figure 2. China Town, NYC

Figure 3. Korea Town, NYC

In her book, The Power of Place (1995), Dolores Hayden situates her thesis of preserving the built environment, and makes an effort to trim down separations between architectural and landscape history and cultural and sociological theory.[2] First, she talks about the notion of place memory, and explains how place and place experiences could contribute to the formation of memory. Then, she describes how the place memory enables us to interact with the built environment, and how important it is to the power of historical buildings and neighborhood communities: authorities with the political power to preserve the urban environment and with the cultural power to preserve the sense of place and the place-specific memory. As an example, she explains her eight years of dedicated service, begun in 1984, as a founder and director of “The Power of Place,” a nonprofit organization intended “to situate women's history and ethnic history in downtown, in public places, through experimental, collaborative projects by historians, designers, and artists”. Power of Place focused on central Los Angeles and its aim was to link the public and social history to the interpretation of specific places through such visual presentation as public art and signage, and furthermore, to research the experiences of ethnic minorities and/or working-class women as well as their distinctive cultures. In sum, she claims that to locate a sense of place, the politics of identity takes primary importance, and the identity is built with a process of collusion between the surrounding environment of a location and the culture which occupies it: “Cultural identity, social history, and urban design are here intertwined.”

Henry Glassie, a distinguished folklorist, supports Heyden’s argument of “place attachment”. His idea of material culture explains that all physical objects in the environment are intimately related and strongly influential to those people in particular culture. That is to say, human beings learn their way of living from their own culture and produce materials they live with, while they perceive and understand from the material things to regenerate the culture. Therefore, he claims that the material culture forms an essential part of cultural identity and by studying the materials throughout the historical focus; we can fully understand one’s culture. In his well-known book, Material Culture (1999), he describes how history and art/folk art/ architecture are interconnected in the study of material culture.[3] He claims that the cultures are created by people; thus, if someone wants to deeply understand the culture, the history and the people, one should actively get involved among the people, experience their culture and appreciate their provinciality. The book mainly follows on his intellectual footstep. He describes a story of his own experiences of foreign cultures and encounters with artists in different parts of the world. For instance, he talks about nonacademic historians, such as Ahmet Balci of Turkey, Hugh Nolan of Northern Ireland, Haripada Pal of Bangladesh, and Siraj Ahmad of Pakistan about their own people, places, cultures and the way they approach for writing a history. Also, he argues that “every building is a cultural fact, the consequence of a collision between intensions and conditions,” and gives several examples. For one case, he compares the bari – a cluster of houses of Bangladesh – and the Dalarna –old Swedish house – and describes how they used their own local materials, adapted to their harsh whether, and arranged their plans according to social relations.

Both Hayden and Glassie strongly emphasized relationship between culture and environment of place. Their point is exceptionally clear and it is not only a useful method to understand the traditional/foreign/rural based cultures, but also a very effective and meaningful way to approach the diverse ethnic cultures within the contemporary cities. However, in such an extensive multicultural society as today, mega cities like London, New York, L.A., Toronto and etc., have inevitable conflicts among different groups and communities, as briefly mentioned previously. Not only there is cultural heterogeneity, but also diversity in the language, religion, education, economy, and so forth; it is not easy to achieve the coexistence and furthermore, growth of several cultures in one boundary. The “creative dissonance” is hard to get.

Marshall (1998) suggests a clue for solving the problem of integration among diverse ethnicity: “In plural societies, people of different ethnic origins meet only in the market-place, where the various groups must trade and exchange goods and services with each other. No common ‘social will’ therefore develops to restrict the exploitation of the members of one group by members of another.”[4] Even though I am partially agreeing with Marshall (I think as generation goes down the boundaries will get blurred and the distances will get closer among different ethnic groups), I believe that one way to tear down the barrier is using a food. Once people start to like each other culture’s food, it indicates that they have already lowered their guards and gradually became open-minded to other culture. In the same context, I see New York City as a “Heterotopias” of creative dissonance. In Manhattan, American fast-food restaurant, Italian pizza parlor, Japanese sushi bar, and Chinese take-out are all in the same block, sometimes even in the same building. There is neither Middle-eastern food district nor Southeast-Asian food district. It is just New York City.

Figure 4. Greenwich village, NYC

Figure 5. Korea Town, NYC

Building a creative dissonance does not have to begin with a giant step. We can gradually achieve it within our everyday life. As Hayden explains, “we then further cement the(se) relations, the(se) flows of power, through a tendency to preserve ‘major architectural monuments’ over neighbourhoods perceived as having little importance to public history.”

NOTE

[1] New York City Department of City Planning Population Division, The Newest New Yorkers 2000, Briefing Booklet: Immigrant New York in the New Millennium (New York: New York City Department of City Planning, 2004).

[2] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995).

[3] Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).

[4] Gordon Marshall. “plural societies.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998.

Fomenting a quiet revolution

N Jonathan Unaka

Using anthropological investigations of the Kabyle of Algeria, Bourdieu elucidates the human condition, by making profound insights about communal interactions.¹ He generates a critical theory that analyzes social structure. He looks at economic transactions, social organization and other examples of culturally based interactions that illustrate the world view of a particular society. This is extrapolated to similar societies and is contrasted with those not seen as similar. The theory thus developed by Bourdieu puts forward the idea of two parallel worlds; the universe of the undisputed (which he calls “doxa”) and the universe of argument. In the first, opinion is disallowed since the nature of doxa is that one is suppressed by the system and self-suppresses, in part because the idea of something different is unknown. Thus an individual in doxa can only push back by further withdrawal (less discourse), which further strengthens the system. In the second universe, there is a division into orthodoxy and heterodoxy. When a break occurs in the doxa (usually by the introduction of a foreign element), the system begins to lose its absolute control. Those who had benefitted from the hierarchy of the society will attempt to reinstate that dominance. This is the development of orthodoxy – using the mechanism of dominance to try to reassert a declining worldview. Conversely, heterodoxy accepts that there are always other ways of seeing the world and often accepts that none are superior. The world the anthropologist is observing has its own rules – its own warrants, which explain the behaviors of the people observed. They inhabit a different world. Though this world is different, there are parallels with the world of the anthropologist. The anthropologist uses language that does not claim to be objective but aspires to be non-judgmental, in the description of the different context. Paradoxically, certain value judgments can be made, within that world-view, in the process of theorizing.

Bringing these ways of theory making by seeking out emergent patterns, art historians are using material culture to help explain the complex web of human interaction. Bernard Herman is a proponent of this approach.² He analyzes the life Thomas Mendenhall, a Wilmington, DE merchant and property owner in the late 18th century. We are introduced to him by way of the demolition his residence in the early 21st century. Herman uses Mendenhall as a lens with which to see the contemporaneous life of Wilmington. He posits that what we glean from this is transferable to the rest of early revolutionary America. He also implies that in understanding the history of this building and its synchronistic context, we can understand something about the decline that it epitomizes in that part of Wilmington, and possibly similar areas of other such cities. To understand this we must travel back to the time of its construction. We must understand what the underlying motivations of the person(s) involved. By observing the evidence of the material record, including architecture and the artifacts of everyday use, in conjunction with the written record, one can arrive at a better, fuller understanding of the setting under study. More broadly, written records of a society “reveal the self-conscious values and beliefs,” whereas, the artifacts of everyday indicate “precisely… what a culture does take for granted.” They are a record, so to speak of the warrants of the culture. Involved in these unearthing are an investigation of the buildings owned by the subject – especially, the one in which he lived, the crockery unearthed from the building site, period city directory, showing ownership of property, bills of sale, invoices of transactions involving the subject, and newspaper articles about the subject. In addition, letters and other correspondence between the subject and others or about the subject and diaries with entries about events that pertain to the subject, also form part of this rich study.

Unlike Bourdieu, Herman does not have access to the subject or other actors. To fill out the picture more comprehensively, he also studies literature about architecture from that period to establish the refinement and relative cost of buildings. He also cites research from other sites detailing crockery unearthed from synchronic location, to establish a relationship between social standing and the types of crockery possessed in a contemporaneous home and documentation showing transactions of importation and sale of crockery at the time to indicate relative costs. He also reads through period city directory, bills of sale, invoices, newspaper articles, letters and diaries discussing pertinent issues more broadly to get a sense of the period. Thus a fuller picture begins to emerge. Dovey discusses Bourdieu’s coinage of habitus to “refer to the complex net of structured predispositions.”³ Thus, the ‘arbitrary’ can be constituted as “‘real’, culture seen as nature, ideology inscribed in habit and habitat,” coloring the landscape, influence our warrants and assumptions. She reflects on how his thinking parallels Giddens’ theory of structuration:

…structuration is based on a differentiation between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. ‘Agency’ is simply the ‘capacity’ to transform our world. ‘Structures’, on the other hand, are the organized properties of social systems in the form of rules and resources, the frameworks of possibility within which our capacities are realized or not. The relations between structure and agency are primarily those of ‘enabling’ and ‘constraining’. Structure both enables and constrains the forms of agency that are possible. And at the same time structures are constructed by agents.⁴

Any urban landscape is thus imbued with these multi-facetted layers of meanings. It is well understood that in looking at a site, architects, urban planners and others professionally engaged in the recording and recreating the environment, glean what they can of topographical and other social records. However, these records are represented, according to Heatherington, “not merely… [by] intellectual labor”, but by “sensation [that] evoke the metaphors that give apparent form and life to history.”⁵ She also writes of conflicting visions of what that past is and what metaphors are used. Hence, the translation of these sensations and material artifacts are in constant flux and are constantly being negotiated. People come with varied notions of what things mean and what meaning is. These differences often align with certain institutions or form along gender lines. Translation here is intrinsic to the everyday lived experience. Since as, Herman has showed, we live in a multi-layered world⁶ that according to Heatherington involves a kind of time travel,⁷ as we are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting the landscape. These interactions operate in a realm that involves complex power dynamics. The interactions of the institutions of the state, often represented by the presence of the police only heighten the creativity with which non-dominant groups manipulate the system.⁸ The dominant group wishes to maintain their position of power and manifests in overt and covert oppression of expression by others. Dominance is maintained through control of structures such as the use of language. Or in the words of Erving Goffman:

Messages that are not part of the officially accredited flow are modulated so as to not interfere seriously with the accredited messages. Nearby persons who are not participants visibly desist in some way from exploiting their communication position and so modify their own communication, if any, so as to provide interference.⁹

In all these environs, there are socially accepted structures, but equally there are frequent transgressions of those social strictures. The marginalized group often takes and owns these restrictions – even celebrating them. For instance, Sharon Zukin discusses the ways members of dominant culture in America historically claimed that it is in “the black ghetto where all blacks ‘belong’, or are relegated, by their exclusion from other social sites.”¹⁰ African Americans, in turn, took ownership of their neighborhoods and develop positive signifiers of the ghetto – even the word begins to have positive connotations. This repeats in numerous immigrant communities and even in so-called homogeneous communities, along gender lines, socio-economic lines, etc…


James C. Scott refers to Hegel in formulating a theory about how the “weak” are constantly testing and questioning the power structures.¹¹ He decries leftist academics who romanticize “peasant revolutions.” He notes that they often never work and in the rare occasions they do, they generally bring in more autocratic regimes. The desires of the peasant multitude are usurped by the dreams of the heroic few. After all, it is rare that the proletariet cared much about Marx’s vision. They often did not wish to rock the boat – they wanted to get by, get through. Thus Scott describes the elaborate ways that the poor of rural Malaysia negotiate within the given power structure of tradition and religion. Thus in any society, history is written and rewritten by these acts of transaction and translation – and the world is enacted through negotiation. These everyday acts are what Scott calls “small arm fire in the class war,” or what a Rasta friend of mine has named “fomenting quiet revolution.”

1 Pierre Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power, in
Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. by Dirks et al. Princeton University
Press, 1994
2 Bernard L. Herman, “Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings: The Fortunes of Thomas Mendenhall”,
Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 19, No. 1. (Spring, 1984), pp. 67-86.
3 Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London: Routledge, 1999, p19
4 Dovey, Framing Places, 1999
5 Tracey Heatherington, “Street Tactics: Catholic Ritual and the Senses of the Past in Central Sardinia”,
Ethnology, vol. 38, no. 4, Fall 1999, pp 315-334
6 Herman, “Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings”
7 Heatherington, “Street Tactics”, 319.
8 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-
27
9 Erving Goffman, Ritual Interaction: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon, 1967. p35
10 Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, 1993
11 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press
1985

A method for understanding the landscape

Material Culture Studies of the Public Realm

Rochelle Scholz
Arch 751

An interesting discussion of the influences past cultures on the current environment was led by Peter Wells, a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, when he recently spoke at UWM as a guest lecturer through the Anthropology and Art History departments. Entitled “Ancient Monuments in Modern Landscapes,” the talk revolved around several European megaliths. Presented as products of ancient cultures efforts, the large stones can be understood to make several statements about the cultures of their designers.

It is very likely that the existence of such megaliths signify political organization and hierarchical social structures in the communities that oversaw their implementation. The reasoning behind this stance notes that the erection of massive stones circa 200ad unquestionably required great effort and coordination. Another manner of confidence considering the monuments pertains to their intentional implementation. Due to the massive size of individual stones and the scale of some arrangements’ extents, there are without doubt specific objectives for the initial placement of these monuments. Of course, the true purposes and original meanings that are nowadays imposed upon the monuments can only be speculative.

The result of an attempt to adopt the monument as an acceptable symbol within their landscape by a later culture, Wells referenced several images of modifications of megaliths, much like the one pictured below. In one image a church was built adjacent to a megalith. In another, a crucifix was simply set atop the erect stone. These efforts to incorporate ancient objects are perhaps of the less offensive variety. Having survived relatively undisturbed for centuries, archaeological remnants have been destroyed, sometimes disassembled, and, on occasional, relocated and reassembled to make way for modern development. Fortunately, preservation is gaining ground for the success stories of monuments that can keep their footing in the landscape, as in London’s Roman wall, where a plaque serves to familiarize an onlooker with the landmark. A key to successfully managing the inherited responsibility to protect such impressive constructions has been education. By creating a platform through which a monument can be understood, modern society can create relationships with the objects scattered about the landscape by foreign cultures.

One method of developing such an understanding is through the field of material culture studies, where the employment of objects as a tool for study is central to practice. A single object speaks as to how something was; a broader context is gained when one object is set next to another, similar in purpose or worth, employing comparison. The transformations of artifacts over time illustrate shifts, disclose histories, describe cultures, and reveal value. Objects worthy of study needn’t necessarily be intentionally designed. Describing the importance of singular objects, Dell Upton, an academic theorist of anthropology and architecture and one of several notable leaders in material culture studies, references James Deetz, the father of the field. In such, he calls for the inclusion of flakes, or accidentals - leftovers from what design sought to secure - as they are influential in how people “cope with the physical world, facilitate social intercourse, and benefit [the] state of mind (52).”

Extrapolating from an analysis underlies this theorist’s need to speak broadly about a society. Focusing upon the urban landscape, Upton asserts “to see the city as artifact, or to apply material culture methods to the city, would be to raise different opinions about the original makers (51).” It is “by probing the experience of the urban landscape [that] the landscape articulates the individual and the social …the self in its surroundings (52).” When an individual, like a monument of Peter Well’s focus, lies within a foreign landscape, an intriguing opportunity that appeals to a material analysis arises.

Addressing the complexity of portraying such identities, Arijit Sen, Assistant Professor of Architecture at UWM and an intellectual of the interwoven landscape of buildings and cultures, refers to creative dissonance. The term describes how a population creates meaningful representations of their culture, world making which involves the use of a transparent and cross-cultural symbology. While intentionally developed first-hand, inaccuracies do exist through translation and the separation of individuals from their initial cultural place. The difficulty of creating a composition of one’s own identity abroad opens a gap through which additional questions arise.

Delving into the works of folklorist Henry Glassie it becomes conceivable to find fault in material culture analysis. As “history begins in the will of the historian, …[it] ignores most people and events while selecting a tiny number of facts and arranging them artfully and truthfully in order to speak usefully about the human condition, [which] means that writing history is speaking myth (6).” The historian’s noble motivation is to develop a sound understanding of the past, which is essential to embracing difference. However, in the future, might our landscapes be detached from societal shifts rendering material culture studies irrelevant?

While Henry Glassie’s examination of architecture is less than a decade old, the stories of people, their places in the world, and the times in which they lived reveal seemingly antiquated societies (1999). In the American urban landscape, the degree to which modern cultures differ from such an existence as the histories he discusses is great. Certainly, rural landscapes and foreign districts, where neighbors look out for and take care of one another, like Ballymenone, a community he studies to great length, are plentiful. However, within the current urban backdrop a dominant force in the success of globalization differs greatly from such close-knit quarters. Hence, it is curious to question to the ability of material culture studies to remain a pertinent method of study well into the future. Might material culture studies be able to analyze with similar success drastically different spaces?

Glassie’s examination of vernacular architecture establishes that its root technologies are about proximity and connections throughout a society’s structure. “Access to materials and direct connections among suppliers, producers, and consumers who spontaneously shape landscape, social orders, and economic arrangements (239).” Doubtlessly, many small towns grew in such a manner while local and regional distinctions encouraged such an existence. However, the rise of industry and its widespread influence does not characteristically bypass localities. Instead, as Glassie describes, “industrial production employs imported materials and complex machinery. It depends on expansive political powers that maintain the costly infrastructure of transportation and communication.” The establishment of this new framework involved numerous new opportunities that granted one’s efforts to make a sufficient living an easier means. The small but strong configurations of the vernacular landscape met competition with the introduction of industry. Whereas in the former structure “wealth circulates in the vicinity,” the latter incorporates multiple economies over a broader landscape, “supporting through law the right of a small minority to amass great reserves of capital (239).” The global economy of the present is a growing force and smaller entities are finding competition difficult.

In contrast to the craftwork of the builders of Ballymenone in Glassie’s description of vernacular architecture, prefabrication in the building industry exemplifies the mass production that typifies today’s larger economies. Additionally, less local services are prevalent and chains develop a typology used to maintain a consistent image from place to place, refusing to feel foreign throughout the nation. In such, it is curious how the methodologies of material culture studies would address the construction and form of the American suburban landscape whereas an interstate drive leaves one city looking much like any other, locales having lost their distinct flavor. The pattern these buildings lay out certainly is representative of a society-wide shift, yet the alteration suggests an abyss between landscape and culture.

In direct contrast, urban immigrants have quite the opposite effect upon their surroundings. At one point in his interesting and broad study on the behavior of people, Edward Hall declares that enclaves have a duty as ethnic groups of American cities separate themselves from one another (174). Organizing in a dense fashion, immigrants develop a presentation of identity in a new place with existing spaces. The buildings they occupy see their facades altered and interiors shifted. New life revives what another culture has discarded. As history is “picked at, scraped down, patched up, and encrusted with new ornament (Glassie, 7),” so are these surrounding landscapes. The frugal efforts of newcomers aim to adapt to their surroundings occur while as individuals maintaining their cultural influences.

There is great significance in their frontage, the streetscape and public sphere. Ray Oldenburg names this essential space the “third place.” Founded to encourage community interaction, it was attended by choice, filling its occupied form through charm and character (24). It is a place of quality where one enjoyed the diverse company of a larger community. While Edward Hall declares that the experience of place makes people (181). Ultimately, to live in a tolerant world, affording significant and sensual experiences, strange things and discovery, design should be directed to embrace the public realm and the cacophonic, mysterious miscellany within. Observing the surroundings, listening to its people, participating in the activity can offer insight with which architects and planners can approach the challenge of global design wisely.



References:
Deetz, James. 1996. In Small Things forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New
York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing.
Glassie, Henry. 1999. Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hall, Edward T. 1982. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday.
Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon House.
Sen, Arijit. 2008. Creative Dissonance: The Politics of World Making. Unpublished
manuscript
Wells, Peter. March 1, 2009. Ancient Monuments in the Modern Landscape.
Archeological Institute of America-Milwaukee Society & UWM Departments of
Anthropology & Art History. Milwaukee.
Upton, Dell. “The City as Material Culture” in The Art & Mystery of Historical Archaeology:
Essays in honor of James Deetz. Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C Beaudry (Editors), Boca Raton, Florida, 1992.

Definition of Public Space and Public Realm, position paper on creative dissonance

ARCH751
Mazzone Giuseppe


Definition of Public Space and Public Realm, position paper on creative dissonance.



In the process of creation a space, the first approach made by men is the anthropization of a territory that represents the physical translation of the idea of territoriality. Through this action, men determine the separation of an area from the space all around it, creating a boundary between their land and the land that belong to the others; a distinction between a private space and a public one. An example from this point of view can be seen in the Nolli Map, where the representation of the space occurs in two colors: white and black.
The meaning of the Nolli Map (fig.1) is not exactly related with the public and private spaces in the city but with the plain and void that create the syntax of the urban space. However, we can imagine that this type of representation can be read thinking at the different movements that people can experience in the city: the plain (usually represented in black) can be interpreted as places where people stops, while the void (usually in white) as places where people is moving. Giving this interpretation to the Nolli Map, the use of two colors only represents a limitation since the spaces where people interact can exist also where people are suppose to stop. So, if we suppose to use the two colors (black and the white) for representing two extreme conditions in the urban experience, a better representation can be done filling the gap between these two opposite colors by using different tones of gray. Through them, it is also possible to obtain a representation of the different types of boundaries expressed by Groàk “opaque, transparent, and permeable”[1] that can to be interpreted not only as physical boundaries, but also as social and cultural boundaries that people are creating among themselves.
Looking at the typical space related to a neighborhood in Unites States, a generic section shows a transition of spaces:
(A) road;
(B) garden 1;
(C) sidewalk;
(D) garden 2 (related to an house);
(E) house.
The transition from A to E (fig.2) shows a passage from a public space (the road) to a private one (the house), passing through three semipublic spaces where the relationship between public and private assumes different proportions. In B (the garden 1) and C (the sidewalk), the percentage of public space is dominant; however, the presence of a percentage of privatization imposes that people have not complete freedom in those spaces, and especially in C. In D (the garden 2), the percentage is completely reversed, so this space is more related to the private realm than to the public one. It is possible to consider it like an extension of the house affecting also part of the sidewalk and determining its “partially loss of freedom”. Moving into the house (E), we enter in a space that is essentially private, but where it is possible to read anyway a changing percentage between public and private realm, even if with a quality of those spaces that is completely different from the ones experienced outside the house. The porch can be interpreted as a public space; the living room as a transitional space; the bedrooms as private spaces. So, making a representation through the Nolli Map:
- the road can be represented in white;
- the side walk and both the gardens can be represented with different tones of gray;
- the house cannot be represented only by black, but through a darker tonality of gray that from the porch is moving toward the black of the bedrooms.
Shifting those ideas into a context outside the private house and more related to the interaction in a urban scale, Lofland shows that the kind of possible interactions that people can experience in an urban environment is related to the way in which them perceive the public space.[2] Looking at the way in which the space structures human interactions, Lofland determines three progressive steps:
1 - How interactions occur;
2 - Who interact with whom;
3 - The content of interaction.[3]
Through those steps the attention is moved on the social aspect that a space determines on people. A good example is represented by the movie “Do the right thing” where the director Spike Lee shows how groups belonging to different cultures develop and idea of segregation even if they share the same space. [4] In fact, while the neighborhood that constitute the scenario of the movie is an Afro-American one, there are in it at least other two groups: a Latino one and an American-Italian one. Even if all of them share the same space, its use is different for each group, reminding to the idea of Intercalation expressed by Dell Upton in his book “Another City.”[5] The meaning of Intercalation can be best express in the animation filed, where it represents the process of connecting two different drawings for the creation of their hypothetic movement. So, moving in the architecture context, intercalation consists in two different objects or building that “are pretty much the same but not absolutely identical.”[6] This definition is very close to the reality shown in the movie of Spike Lee, where different cultural groups are living in their own heterotopia,[7] with its own un-physical boundaries. The only person in this multi-layered reality that can move among all those heterotopias is a homeless, because his living world is the city itself and not a space cut out from it.
Used in this way, both the idea of heterotopia and intercalation can be considered close one to each other, since both of them are related to the personal interpretation that different people are giving to the same urban space. Using again the Nolli Map, it is like everyone distributes the grayscale in a different way related to their own vision and experience of reality.
The task of looking through those different interpretations of the same reality trying to capture the essence of society is done by the ethnographer, who “reconstructs not the physical space but the social context related to spaces in the present and in the past.”[8] The analysis of the social structure at the base of human interactions[9] gives the possibility to create a “stage” where those interactions happen and where the ethnographer has to recognize the difference between the alteration of reality and the pure reality. This is to say to understand how much the subjectivity of the storyteller is affecting the objectivity of reality. Through this process, it is possible to reconstruct the type of interaction that people are experiencing in the studied context. Further information can be reached looking at the physical aspect too, analyzing how architecture is used in that context for giving emphasis to some particular behaviors, justifying some particular actions, and responding to the idea of microsociology[10] by Sharon Zukin. An example is the different types of not-generalizable interactions that Miles Richardson recognizes moving in a plaza or in a market. While in the plaza, the interactions among people are formal; in a market the same interactions occur in a more informal way.[11] In fact, markets can be considered like a reproduction on a smaller scale of an urban structure, since they usually work on two sides of a pedestrian road showing a similar hierarchization of public and private spaces. The difference from the urban context is in the quality of sounds that they produce:[12] in an urban context we move from a loud space (the road) to a quiet space (the house), while in a market both spaces (the pedestrian road and the stand’s space) have the same loudness, suggesting people to have more informal interactions. In a plaza instead, even if the level of loudness is the same everywhere, usually people tend to create groups maintaining interactions that are more formal.
A similar control on the different human interactions can be moved in a larger scale looking at what Lofland call the “monitoring behavior.”[13] Its purpose can be described as a way to guarantee a “controlled interactions” among people through four different stages of control:
1-Privatization;
2-Shadow privatization;
3-Panopticon approach;
4-Hideway approach.[14] (fig. 3)
Those four stages are moving through spaces whose control became progressively stronger. While in stage 1 and 2 it is still possible to perceive an idea of public space, in stage 3 it tends to disappear for its heavy control, and in stage 4 it is completely gone because the access itself to those areas is almost hidden, transforming those spaces in a kind of “secret gardens” known only by few people. The result is that those type of spaces result to be too much controlled and the types of interactions seems occur in a less natural way.
Moving to a bigger scale, J.B.Jackson, analyzes how natural interactions occur in the American cities’ landscape,[15] where the real landmarks are now represented by places promoting social life and creating a sense of place[16] (like a church); and where the human interactions occur because people choose spontaneously to share the same timetable through social activities, creating a sense of time.[17] So, this idea of natural human interactions results related to values that go beyond the architectural physicality of an urban landscape, showing that the urban experience is something that should be fully experienced with all the five senses.[18]

Personal views affect the way in which people make experience of human interactions and of the surrounding space. Usually in any space is possible to read a percentage of appropriation that can be translated in a kind of semi-privatization’s process. The same idea to give a sense of freedom to everyone experiencing a public space (typical of the American urban landscape) determines their progressive privatization that is justified by the purpose of making them more appealing so that everyone expects to receive in them a precise social experience related to the different level of interaction chosen. The basic idea of those public or semi-public spaces is to give to everyone the illusion of being part of a society. The constant background of music and the sounds of the surrounding people are able to create the idea of a social experience even if someone choose to avoid a direct human interaction, translating in this way the personal view of society that each person has. It seems an interesting controlled way to respond at the plurality of social expectations of people in a landscape where the creation of neighborhoods seems to increase not only the social distance between people but also their physical distance, since every single house has its own surrounding space with its invisible but strong boundaries.






















Fig. 1
The Nolli Map of Rome (detail)















Fig. 2
A typical section of a road in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.It is possible to read the different five spaces of a urban context: (from the right to the left) the road, the first strip of green space, the sidewalk, the second strip of green space, and the house. Each one of these space has a different percentage of private and public quality.











Fig. 3
An example of “Hideway Approach” in the city of Milwaukee. The plaza in the picture (at the third level) is accessible only from the inside of the two buildings on its sides: a building of university housing on the right and a school’s building on the left.






Notes

[1] Steven Groàk, The idea of building: thought and action in the design and production of buildings (Taylor & Francis, 1992),.28
[2] Lyn H.Lofland, The public realm: exploring the city’s quintessential society territory (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998)
[3] Lyn H.Lofland, ibid.
[4] Spike Lee, Do the right thing, 1989. The movie represents the social interaction of different cultural groups in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where are living mainly by Afro-American people. The presence of an Italian pizzeria in it represents a kind of intrusion and an invasion of territory, especially inside it there are references to the American-Italian culture but none to the Afro-American one.
[5] Dell Upton, Another City: urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic, (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008)
[6] Dell Upton, ibid.
[7] Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics 16, Spring 1986, 22-27
[8] Rhys Isaac, “Discourse on method,” in The transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 323-357
[9] Isaac, ibid.
[10] Sharon Zukin, “While the city shops” in The culture cities (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 187-258. Microsociology looks at the public spaces as realms where the interactions among persons occur, but not in a way that is always generalizable.
[11] Miles Richardson, “Being-in-the-market versus being-in-the-plaza: material culture and construction of social reality in Spanish America,” in The anthropology of space and place: locating culture (Setha M.Low and Denise Lawrence-Zunigais [Editors], New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 74-91
[12] Dell Upton, idib.
[13] Lofland, idib.
[14] Lofland, ibid.
[15] J.B.Jackson, “A sense of place , a sense of time,” in A sense of place, a sense of time (Albuquereue: Yale University Press, 1994), 149-164
[16] J.B.Jackson, ibid.
[17] J.B.Jackson, ibid.
[18] Dell Upton, idib.





Bibliography

Groàk, Steven. The idea of building: thought and action in the design and production of buildings. Taylor & Francis, 1992

Lofland, Lyn H. The public realm: exploring the city’s quintessential society territory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998

Upton,Dell. Another City: urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic. Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008

Foucault,Michel. Diacritics 16. Spring 1986

Isaac,Rhys. The transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982

Zukin, Sharon. The culture cities. New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1995

Richardson, Miles. The anthropology of space and place: locating culture. Setha M.Low and Denise Lawrence-Zunigais (Editors), New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003

Jackson, J.B. A sense of place, a sense of time. Albuquereue: Yale University Press, 1994
Lee, Spike. Do the right thing. USA 1989

Geography of a recession

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