Sunday, 14 April 2013

360 Degrees - Reflections, Comparisons, Conclusions

My Picture Blog: Facets of Urban Life

"The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap.
But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.
Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.”

Lewis Mumford

                So this is it, the last entry in my journey through the many Facets of Urban Life. As you know, this blog was an assignment given by my Urban Geography professor in hopes of broadening the dialogue of urban geography debates, opinions and general information coming from not only the Caribbean but (as much as I hate this term) the Global South. It has truly been a journey for me, not only in taking and interpreting original photography but in exploring and rediscovering my writing skills. I believe the pen (or in this case the keyboard) is such a strong medium to use in expression oneself and I’m thankful to my professor for not only inspiring me to use my words again -- a passion I had long forgotten in the monotony of academia -- but to explore and value the urban space around me. It is  startling to know how much an entity I gave little to no thought about has impacted my way of thinking, broadened my appreciation for what is around me and most importantly has given my words confidence again.

This assignment involved my entire "GEOG2007" class, and in closing I’d like to draw on 3 of my peers’ blogs which have touched on slightly more focused topics than mine. In this blog I haven’t spoken about homelessness in the city, transportation or urban attitudes as much as I wanted to. To compensate for this I’d like to draw reference to:

Each of these blogs gave different perspectives to urban life touched on concepts of urban geography that I did not. In choosing my theme “Facets of Urban Life” I wanted to give as wide a range as I could on concepts pertaining to urban geography as outlines by the textbook Urban Geography by Hall and Barrett. My colleagues however filled in the gaps where I could not.

Briefly put:
  •  Tamara outlined the idea of what it means to be homeless and the many dimensions of homeless people in our cities
  • Avinash spoke of different facets of urban transport also highlighting the many problems he has faced personally in the public transport systems while also pointing out the good aspects of mass and personal modes transit and lastly,
  • Arielle with her beautiful and poetic writing touched on the personal side of urban life, the interaction of people, the everyday ups and downs of urban life and the idea of religion and community within cities.

All these are important aspects of urban life and are all thought provoking in their content. I hope that you’ll take a look at these blogs, as well as others they would have cited in their final blog entry.
Thanks to everyone who has read, commented and supported this brief yet insightful journey through the many facets of urban life. It has truly been a passionate journey for me. Stay tuned for future blogs and I intend to continue my writing to the best of my ability.

Yours in writing,
Hannah Sundari Sammy

Saturday, 13 April 2013

Sustainability in the City...contemplating City Size, Green Spaces and Urban Attitudes


Tunnel of Green
 “Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair”
 Khalil Gibran

(i)                  This photograph was taken in Port of Spain, near to Serpentine Road. It’s a little way off the Queen’s Park Savannah, one of the major green spaces in Trinidad’s capital. However I chose this picture to start my entry on sustainability in the city simply because this tunnel of green in my opinion epitomizes all that is clean, surreal, pristine and natural about the city. Right in the heart of Port of Spain, amidst the noise and the chaos of the modern city is such a beautiful sight, an urban landscape on the brink of extinction, tucked away in the a tiny crevasse, adjacent to an every growing, ever sprawling city that waits ready and anxious to swallow it up.

Urban Green Spaces...
an unstoppable force meets an immovable object

(ii)                Sustainability and the city had been outlined in Hall and Barrett’s final chapter in their book Urban Geography. They talk of sustainability and sustainable development emerging slowly but surely out of the shadows into post-modern talks about the future. “The city has been identified as a key building block in the path toward a more sustainable world” (Hall and Barrett, 2012) as it has become clear to researchers that the city is an inevitable force that never ceasing to stop growing or affecting those around and within it. This includes the environment as the battle rages on between the immovable object that is nature and the unstoppable force that it urbanization.

Recently I attended the Caribbean Urban Forum 2013 in the Hilton Trinidad, and one of the key issues talked about in light of last year’s Rio +20 conference was the idea of sustainable development and the dire need for countries all around the world to adopt policies today that will preserve resources and the environment for the needs of future generations. Hall and Barrett recognize that sustainability when it comes to cities does not only entail protection of the environment but involves issues such as non-renewable resource depletion and toxic emissions. The difference between normal use and unsustainable use in this case lies in the crossing of the line that separates sparing and responsible usage and greedy use to the point of irreparable damage.



The debate between urban size and form and sustainability has been long-winded and significant in the creation of arguments for and against large and small cities. Below is a table I have made up outlining the arguments brought forward by Breheny (1995) as to why larger cities are indeed more sustainable:

LARGE CITIES
SMALL CITIES
1.       More compact cities means less commuting distance.

2.       Higher population densities leads to relatively low car usage


3.       Extensively developed and efficient mass transit systems.

4.       Higher level of political resources that can be mobilized to manage environmental problems

5.       Large cities act as ‘cradles of innovation and the development of technology’ that might enhance further sustainable development ventures.

Decentralization of cities actually means higher commuting distances to suburbs.

Lower population densities: car usage is twice as high as in areas of highest population density.

Less developed or inefficient mass transit systems because of the heavy reliance on personal cars.




























Regardless of size one aspect of sustainable development that researchers agree on is that green spaces are essential in the city. This is referred to as ‘greening of the city’. Hunter and Haughton (1994) see plants as playing important roles in cities as moderators of human activities, for example absorbing emissions. Interestingly, Hough (1995) has made a distinction between two types of green spaces:

1.       Formally planned green spaces, referred to as manicured civic spaces and pedigreed landscapes such as gardens and boulevards.
2.       Unplanned green spaces, referred to as fortuitous, forgotten and neglected spaces.

Planned vs. Unplanned Green Space

While one would think the former description would be the most beneficial as they are more viewer friendly and ironically the more popular green spaces in cities, Hough notes that it is that latter ‘fortuitous landscapes’ that are actually more beneficial to the city. Among his reasons for this are: they aid in the development of diversity, they consume little external resources (no need for watering or maintenance), the plants reflect local ecology.

Also heard in talks concerning green spaces regard the size and distribution of these landscapes. Again, the green spaces that we see all around us, the large, homogenous, singular parks are seen to be not ideal by researchers. Haughton and Hunter (1994) outline that while large parks can offer some psychological benefits, socially and environmentally they are not sustainable. Large parks are found to break up traffic routes leading to increased congestion and higher levels or car usage, support narrow ecology, promote mass migration of animals to a few dispersed green spaces and encourage delinquent social activity such as drug-dealing, rapes and robberies. Rather than have few very large parks, researchers suggest that spreading smaller parks throughout the city and developing neighborhood or pocket parks may be more beneficial psychologically, socially, and environmentally for cities.

What can be said of Port of Spain's Green Spaces?? 
 
An article in the Trinidad Newsday: 
is this the best idea for green space in Trinidad? Who is it catering to? who has access to it? who is excluded? is it really green space?? http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/print,0,171898.html
Lastly, I just want to touch on urban attitudes and sustainability. Take a look at this picture I took in Port of Spain. Note that the sign is saying DO NOT LITTER…I find this absolutely appalling and sadly so representative of human nature. What can be the cause of this defiance? this lack of care for your own surroundings? this non-existent consideration for others, the city and the environment? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this photo..

CAPTION THIS!!
(p.s. look i'm there in the side mirror!!)
(iii)               Of course a few links to look at:

-          Guerilla Gardeners: one London gardener on a mission to make our green spaces brighter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssz8AvCrqoM

-          This film gives details of the green-belt alliance and lets you know what you can do to help http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-45ZfKLamg


-          Stockholm is the very first city to be designated European Green Capital 2010 by the EU Commission http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuMuMnvcYvA

-          The city of Curitiba, capital of Parana State in south-east Brazil, opted for a sustainable development track as early as the 1970s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeAZsmpt7a8


Sunday, 7 April 2013

Urban Change: Out with the Old, In with the New



“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction” – Winston Churchill

(i)                  It is said that change is the only constant. In our lives, in our homes, our feelings, our opinions, our value systems all subject to that one thing we fight so hard against: change. Everything is changing and that includes our urban surroundings. Whether it is toward sustainable development, a new city focus, involving gentrification processes or initiating new class regimes, urban change is evident and incredibly forceful in its methods.

This photograph was taken on the Eastern Main Road in Trinidad. This building is, or rather was the ‘Presidente’ cinema in San Juan. I thought it was a fitting representation of urban change as you can see it has been replaced, while keeping its original face, by a car parts store. I found this a rather interesting portrayal or urban change as it is something I’m sure we can all relate to: old building being replaced by new ones, the constant life and death cycle of stores. The urban landscape as we know it is fast pace, dog-eat-dog and highly competitive. Who will stand and who will perish under the dynamic supply-and-demand regime of our urban arenas? Businesses today have to play a lifelong game of dodge-ball with a nation of entrepreneurs ready to pounce at the slightest sign of weakness. Adapt or die…there is no other way.

(ii)                I mentioned two aspects of urban change above: change toward sustainable development and change regarding gentrification processes within cities. These two avenues for change can be seen as, in my opinion, the most popular avenues of change seen in the post modern era of urban geography. I planned to talk about sustainability in cities in my final blog post, so for now I’ll speak briefly on gentrification (a concept I am still a little blurry on), or at least what I perceive gentrification to be as it manifests itself in Trinidad.

Gentrification: Out with the old, In with the new

Gentrification is written about in Ch. 9: ‘Housing and Residential Segregation’ in the book Urban Geography by Hall and Barrett. I found this strange at first because I with the definition I knew, the concept never really struck me as concerning residential segregation. Nonetheless, here is a definition by Lees et al (2008):

‘The transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle class residential and/or commercial use’

The main idea of gentrification is the displacing of traditional residential structures such as the idea of wealthier outer city suburbs, with inner city regeneration and redevelopment of vacant properties that once moved people outward. However, an increasing phenomenon is the move back into city centres with the improvement of these once shunned areas.

The idea of gentrification as expressed by Hall and Barrett outlines the issues of the displacement of lower income groups that once flocked to the inner city lower income housing. A key motivator for gentrification to take place is the idea of the 'rent gap', that is, the difference between the rent obtained at present for a property and the potential future rent that could be obtained after renovation. Developers and planners realize that certain inner city properties are home to a creative class, a chic, bohemian-style sector of the population that above all can be marketed to the advantage of landlords....urban change for the better?? I wonder...





My photograph at the beginning of the entry doesn't portray the idea of residential displacement, but rather the idea of a change in building usage and at times land use entirely. Such transformation of land use was recognized in another course work assignment I had for my Urban Geography course which required us to survey a transect of Tunapuna, along the Eastern Main road. What I noticed was the increasing tendency of multiple or mixed land uses in the same compound, and an increasing density of commercial land use as the transect moved further east.

My transect of a portion of the Eastern Main Road in Tunapuna. Trinidad

This is the analysis I did on the transect of Tunapuna:   

It was not a surprise that most of the land uses were commercial, since properties on the main road are seen as prime real estate opportunities for businesses. This is due to its ease of access and the steady flow of people in and around the area. There is however, a growing trend of multiple use buildings, either a mixture of commercial uses or commercial and residential uses. Some of the two storey buildings often had residences on the upper floor and businesses on the lower floor. It was noted that residential units were located to the back of the building with businesses taking up the entire vertical front of the building. This showed an ingenious use of space, which with growing urban populations is becoming a rarity. The businesses involved in this form were small scale, usually privately owned cafes, food outlets or clothes stores.

Overall in the commercial activity along the Eastern Main Road shows heavy private sector activity. Many private doctors’ offices were seen, including St. Augustine Private Hospital. A number of privately owned hair and nail salons and barber shops were noted as forming clusters within buildings of multiple commercial use. In fact, in many of these buildings, similar companies seemed to flock together. Reasons for this could be to facilitate joint entrepreneurial ventures, the efficient use of similar resources or even to take advantage of the same pool of customers.

In the St. Augustine portion of the transect (before St. John road), the trend of building usage leans toward professional commerce-type businesses, with a generally high amount of insurance firms, banks, medical services and also tend to have larger compound sizes. On the other hand east of St. John Road, moving into the Tunapuna region the buildings are of a more entrepreneurial nature, with a large amount of them used as retail clothes and shoes stores as well as convenience or variety stores. The lots of land also become smaller and more divided while the buildings grow increasingly upward in an attempt to find space for expansion. Also, an increase in the number of businesses involved in the informal sector was seen as the study moved toward the east, into Tunapuna.

According to Hall and Barrett in their book Urban Geography, the informal sector is described as being extremely diverse. Dicken (2004) notes that the informal sector cannot be easily quantified or measured because it is a “floating kaleidoscope phenomenon, continually changing in response to shifting circumstances and opportunities”. The informal sector shows itself in the Tunapuna/St. Augustine region in the form of fruit stalls, market vendors and many roadside clothes and shoe vendors. In addition to this, and supporting the idea that the informal sector has many faces is the presence of numerous variety stores. In one instance an entire compound that used to belong to Monarch Cinema has been converted into a huge galvanize and wooden structure, crammed to the top with seemingly unrelated items. Also, in the market area, many vendors sell quite a few unrelated items and can quickly offer customers many choices. These vendors are on the streets all day, sometimes from early in the morning till late at night, usually in small groups of relatives (children and their parents) operating at a small scale. With reference to the text, these are all characteristics of the informal sector outlined by Drakakis-Smith (2000), a growing part of city economics.

For the most part, the structure of this section of the Eastern Main Road shows three major trends in land use and form. Firstly, there is a more integrated use of building space with a given building or compound being used in a wider variety of ways than in the past. Secondly, an increase in the proximity of like businesses is seen, as more similar organizations flock together for various reasons such as conserving resources or taking advantage of the same market of consumers.  Lastly, a growing private sector and informal sector is noticed as small scale entrepreneurial businesses are on the rise. All these together increase the popularity of urban spaces, fuelling the never ending fire of development that is urban growth. 

Urban change in the Global South and especially the Caribbean in my opinion takes a different form from the urban change described previously in the form on gentrification processes. I see urban change taking place rather in the commercial sectors with the changes in types and orientation of land uses. With this change from a human geography point of view, sees changes in attitudes, relations between classes, the resolution or irritation of conflicts as new people move in and out of the city. I see the city like a living, breathing organism capable of change, dynamistic tendencies, death and rebirth of sectors, rather than a rigid, physical and non-living structure removed from the human potential for change. What does your city look like? How is your city changing? And what are the consequences of this change?

(iii) A few links to look at:



Sunday, 31 March 2013

Urban Conservation: Shadows of the Past..

Shadows of the Past

“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught” - Baba Dioum

Everything about me is reduced, discolored, broken, beaten and bruised.
I am not the strong, confident, pillar of strength I was in the past.
The youth that once flowed deep within me, warming my soul, I forever gone, like a feather blowing in the wind, moving more swiftly than I my dwindling reflexes an bare.
No vacancy, No vending, No soliciting, No trespassing
So many rules to follow, yet I am too weak to care, too frail to raise protest, too fearful, too timid, too intimidated to state my true feelings.
You have no idea what I once was, you can’t act like you understand because you cannot possibly conceptualize how great I once stood.
You stupid child, telling me what to do, where to go, how to live my life!
It is you who have made me this way, you have ruined me by remaining impartial, indifferent, and unconcerned with the pile of waste I have become.
No one to hear my stories, no one to know my history, no one to care about my experiences, no one to learn from my past transgressions.
                                      My life is reduced to speculation, opinion, inference, suggestion.
For God’s sake get these plastic bandages off of me!
 Can’t you see they’re bruising me, discoloring what was once a clean, smooth surface?
Itchy leaves, scratching all over…
No room to breathe in this compound, any hope I had of fresh air has been boarded up with these flimsy pieces of wood...My lungs are burning in desperation
Bone on bone, grinding away at the joints, bucking under the weight of what little bodyweight I still have…
Gates forever closed, paint forever pealing and fading and chipping away.
 Not much different from my soul,
At least now my outsides are consistent with my insides….

(i)            I took this picture while by brother was driving backward along the Queen’s Park Savannah (sorry for any lives we may have endangered that day). This building is one of Trinidad’s Magnificent Seven, the Mille Fleurs building…sound’s grand doesn’t it? Well here it is for you…in all its…magnificence?

the Mille Fleurs: Past vs. Present




I want to talk today about ‘conserving urban landscapes’. Hall and Barrett in their book Urban Geography talks about this in Ch. 6. Now, at first glance I thought exactly what any weary student like myself would think: “Not another reading about saving the goddamned environment!!!”  (of course all I read was the word ‘conserving’)




Now, please don’t be confused, I know I’m doing geography but there’s only so much I can read about conserving the environment...And I guess it’s that kind of attitude that has the world in the quandary it’s in today....but alas, that is a different topic for a different day.

(ii)               For now I’ll start with a brief explanation about what the idea of conserving urban landscapes. According to Hall and Barrett, conserving the past has been a long intellectual tradition, involving the desire to preserve particular monuments and buildings within a country. I talked before in a previous post about the idea of planned cities and the fact that it assumed rationality, predictability and in sum squashed all human essence of the urban. This topic is also from the same chapter, and I find it extremely interesting as it advocates for the complete opposite. Urban conservation aims at preserving those same irrational, emotion-driven and human aspects of an urban landscape that planned cities aimed at toppling and simply rebuilding in a more ordered way.



Now, if you’re a frequent reader, you’ll know I’m quite passionate when it comes to preserving personal identity, culture and the importance of distinguishing those innate, and indigenous elements of an area against foreign inevitable intrusions. Hall and Barrett also write passionately about justification for conserving buildings within a city, core to its identity. They speak of intellectual, psychological and financial rationales for conservation efforts:

Tradition
Description


Intellectual Tradition
The idea that buildings should be retained for their artistic, architectural or historical qualities and therefore for the role which these buildings serve in illuminating the cultural elements of a society.



Psychological Tradition
Linked to the reactions to the increasing pace and scale of urban change. Here, loss of urban environments through redevelopment leads to ‘future shock’ (Toffler 1970) where residents feel a sense of dislocation from the urban.


Financial Tradition
The idea that urban conservation activities can have economic benefits stemming from using conserved buildings in contemporary development.


It is important to note however, especially in terms of the financial tradition that urban conservation efforts can be seen in light of the financial burden they may cause a city. Much has been written about the burdens associated with building conservation. For example, the cost of maintaining buildings, use of specialized building materials and expertise and replacing outdated structures and foundations can be seen as a bother to a fast pace and dynamically changing modern city. One example of the bother of conserving buildings is the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, also one of the Magnificent Seven buildings. The project was contracted to Kee Chanona Ltd for $34.5 million and restoration work began in January 2007. It is now 2013 and If I recall the project took about 3-4 years to complete entirely. I will say now however, that the building is absolutely beautiful. The question remains however, which is more profitable? Was rebuilding the QRC worth it? or should they have just scrapped it and built a new school with modern architectural designs.

Renovated: Queen's Royal College

 In my opinion, our sense of place, our culture, our heritage matters more. I feel like in such a fast-pace world, full of wealth and prosperity we are far too eager to forget the past, forget our history and simply move on toward a brighter future.  How can we have future generations that know nothing about the stories out cities have to tell? Stories of struggle, of freedom, stories of pain and sorrow, of joy and hope. We much appreciate our past…we must fight to protect it and conserve it no matter what cost. There are so many buildings in Trinidad that have such rich history, but a laid waste against a backdrop of modernized structures.

 Four surviving buildings from before WWII in Warsaw, Poland.
 A prime example of how easily people opt to destroy culturally saturated monuments.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/31/plans-to-destroy-prewar-building-in-former-warsaw-ghetto-set-off-struggle-to/#ixzz2P9NYkUKh

On a final note I implore you, see the value in the old, the vintage, the antique…not only buildings, but the elderly. We live in an individualistic society, a Western-influenced society, quick to push aside those who are of no use to us. We stand alone, look out for ourselves. But this attitude will get us nowhere. If we damage and mistreat, if we forget where who our ancestors are, what they fought for, how can we ever hope to move forward.

Appreciate your past…or be lost to a sad and meaningless life, a lack of identity and no place to call home…your past is your future, look to it or lose it.

Legislation according to the Government of India, Archaeological Survey http://www.asiguwahaticircle.gov.in/legislations.html

(iii)               A few links to take a look at:

-          An article from the Guardian Newspaper talking about the conservation of buildings like the Mille Fleurs.

-          The website for the ‘Citizens for Conservation, Trinidad and Tobago’, a local conservation activist group

-          Another article from the Guardian Newspaper about restoration work being done on the President’s House


Monday, 25 March 2013

Experiencing the City...what our senses tell us


Collage: Traffic by the Grand Bazaar Flyover (top left), a blur of passers by on the Brian Lara Promenade (bottom left), the huge advertising screen on top of KFC near the Brian Lara Promenade (right)

‘The richly varied places of the world…are rapidly being obliterated under a meaningless pattern of buildings, monotonous and chaotic’ - C.W. Moore

Everywhere I go the
same places, the same
faces, the same buildings, the same problems.
Street signs, repetitive designs,
all melding together into one
monochromatic blur.
I feel nothing, toward to city,
No emotion, even less consideration
toward the notion that this is my city.
In and out.
Cars move
in and out and up and down
streets.
People move in and out and up and down streets,
and buildings.
No one looks around, no one to stop
to look and listen,
and FEEL.
So many people, so much diversity
yet…the production and reproduction of
a city consisting of shades of grey,
furthermore dulled
by superficial relationships compounded by inauthentic places,
a flat, monotonous, commercialized urban space.

one giant 'suburbia', where everything is the same...

(i)                  The city is not just buildings and roads. It is not simply physical, material, tangible. Rather the city is what we FEEL…what we SMELL…what we TASTE…and what we SEE. The city is a mixture of emotion…love, anger, sadness, happiness, frustration, amazement. The city is a beautiful and magical place to some, while to others it’s a dark, lonely pit. Why is this? How can the same city be represented with such opposite features? The role of our senses, our bodies, our perceptions should not be taken for granted as we deconstruct that which is urban. So far in my previous blog entries I have looked at the city as an accumulation of physical features. This entry I will attempt to take it a bit further, to dive into the realm of an aspect of cities that I feel is not accounted for in the physical planning of urban areas…Emotional relationships between person and place…let see if you all can keep up with my psychological mumbo-jumbo…



Really I’d like to jump right into some academic analysis on everyday life in cities, and what it means to value landscapes….but I was particularly glad when I read this chapter, as doing a double major in Geography and Psychology; I finally got a change to say to all those people shooting me judgmental looks when they hear of my degree choice, “See!! They do go together!!” (In this one tiny chapter of this one random book haha).

(ii)                That being said, the focus of this week’s entry is a picture collage displayed above made up of fragments of photographs which I hope will portray the idea of “Experiencing the city” which Hall and Barrett in their book ‘Urban Geography’ talk about in Ch. 10.

They cite Edward Relph in this chapter, and his critique of urban landscapes, which I found quite exhilarating. Relph argues that ‘the modern urban world is becoming increasingly characterized by inauthentic places and superficial relationships between people and place’. With increasing globalization (note his point of view is strictly anti-globalization), Relph argues that growing mobility, travel, the centralization of planning and increasing commercialization of urban landscapes added to the serial reproduction of architectural designs is contributing toward the erosion of the deep emotional attachments between people and place.

‘We appear to be forsaking nodal points for a thinly-spread coast-to-coast continuity of people, food, power, and entertainment; a universal wasteland … a chromium-plated chaos’- Gordon Cullen

'Media-scapes' : the look of globalization,
 a universal wastelend of food, power and entertainment... 
Now on a side note, for those who have been keeping up to date with my blog entries, the same factors Relph notes above are some of the things I critiqued (quite harshly at times) in my previous posts…this got me thinking as to whether I was (maybe a little) anti-globalization…while this is quite a controversial stance (and I am neither going to agree nor disagree as to my my affiliation with this point of view) I feel that we need to start coming to terms with the possibility that the ‘globalization’ we learn about in primary and secondary school isn’t the ‘fairy-land-fantasy’ that it’s made out to be…the fact is not everyone benefits from increased capitalism, liberalized trade and from my point of view this ‘global village’ everyone paints in bright, pretty colours is quite frankly a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world, plagued with inequality, poverty, injustice, abuse, neglect and the list goes on and on…

Globalization,
a dictatorship if I ever saw one...
"Capitalism is a thug's economy, a heartless economy, a base and vile and largely boring economy. It is the antithesis of human fulfillment and development. It mocks equity and justice. It enshrines greed…" - Michael Albert

Now, back on track then…in terms of our senses and the city, not a lot of work has been done within Urban Geography studies on the role of these senses in understanding the environment. In my opinion (and I say this with little intention to offend) this lack of academic attention paid to the role of the senses is due in part to the entire world of achedemia being obsessed with the idea of quantitative analysis and positivist tendencies. Us, social sciences try so hard to keep our discipline in the hard-sciences category that we overlook the very characteristic that makes us ‘social’- people, emotions, perceptions…irrational, illogical human behavior. Thank the universe that someone came up with ‘environmental psychology’ and the idea of (god forbid) cross-disciplinary research which incorporated concepts from behavioral geography and cognitive psychology.

The many facets that constitute the Environmental-Behavior, the Space-Body relationship 

Thankfully after all this who-ha, studies were in fact conducted in an attempt to understand information processing through our senses as it related to cities. And now we’re back to square one…experiencing the city

 The point I’m trying to make is that what we feel toward our city, the perception we have of our urban spaces is a vital part of understanding the ‘urban’. Vagrants, businessmen, the disabled, minorities and marginalized groups all have different stories to tell of their experiences within the city. Did the city embrace them with open arms? Did the city exclude them, damning them to a cold and splintered reality? What does out city form say about our attitudes toward people, toward outsiders? I spoke in previous posts about our city not being reflective of the ‘local’. Does this too not constitute our experience of the city?

What is your perception of urban landscape??
 Lastly, I just want to touch on work done by Valentine (2001) and a host of researchers before him on the body. This research moves beyond sensory perception and looks at the ways that bodily abilities differ between individuals, on a social level. Hall and Barrett describe the body as ‘providing a bridge between the biological and the social, the private and the public’. What an amazing dimension of analysis! In studying psychology I’m so preoccupied with the mind and individual differences in the behaviors of people, who would have thought to analyze the physical body as a psychological and geographical dual-process of experience!?

"the body as the bridge between the biological and the social, the public and the private..."
 In this way, they talk bout they city acting on the body in social contexts. They mention the pressure on bodies to conform to the ‘ideal’ or the ‘appropriate’ and the effects of authority, security, signs, advertisement, and building structures on reinforcing these elements. Imagine yourself in a city that didn’t cater for your personality, or your physical characteristics, or your circumstances…imagine your experience of that city…

(iii)               Okay…that was quite long, I know..so as usually just a few things to look at in case you want to read up or research some more:

-          Two websites from the University of Central Lancashire’s website, an interesting read and some of the quotes used came from it:

-          A short video showing people in cities…a lot of visual representations, what about the other senses? What do you taste, smell, feel?

-          Interesting experience of the city: