Robert Moses

I live on Long Island and grew up knowing the name Robert Moses. It is a very popular beach in the area. During high school I learned that he was also responsible for the three highways that ran across Long Island, the Long Island Expressway, the Northern State Parkway and the Southern State Parkway. These are the only roads that can get you on or off the island and if you ask me they work out just fine.

Others have a lot of complaints about the road systems, saying they cause congestion and are poorly planned. An interesting fact about them is that he built them purposely to keep out the lower classes. All of the overhangs are extremely low so trucks cannot go on either parkway. He did this to keep it so buses from Manhattan could not come out to the beaches. He felt that if they could the homeless and lower classes would use the buses to invade the island and take away from its beauty. He was extremely partial to the upper classes and built the highways so they could more easily commute. He was a good friend of Henry Fords and was trying to help out the production of the automobile.

Moses may have a lot of haters but either way he had great influence upon the cities of America. he is viewed as a master builder who structured the way Long Island runs. He may have doomed Long Islanders to constant congestion but he also provided us with some of the prettiest beaches in the country, I think thats a fine trade.

Technology: Speeding up the World

Technology has become necessary to life in today's society. The other day I wanted to order food from dominoes. I was just going to call in and order but my boyfriend wanted to see the menu. I explained that we didn't have a menu handy and he would just have to deal. He than got on his phone and ordered pizza without even making a phone call! He simply used a new technology that I had never heard of called mobile ordering, he texted in his order. I simply could not believe it, everyday there is something new that can be done via email, phone, or text. Technology is beginning to rule the world, making things easier and quicker but also desensitizing the human population.

I look back to when I was a kid and I didn't even have a computer until I has 6 or 7 years old. Today children that age have cellphones, sometimes nicer ones than I do. Today they have DVD's and BluRay when I had VHS and before me there was nothing. Children today play with the WII and XBOX when I was struggling to get my Sonic to work on the Sega. Times are constantly changing and technology is advancing in leaps and bounds.

All these advancements have made everyone operate quicker. Business especially has sped up. It no longer takes snail mail to deliver messages but email and cellphones. Money can be transferred at the drop and the hat and that means that the global economy has also sped up. Everything moves so quickly and changes occur so rapidly throughout the world. None of this would be possible without all the advancements being constantly made in the technological world.

Panopticism

In today's technology filled world privacy has become somewhat relative. With computers, cellphones, the internet, and youtube everyone is constantly connected every minute of every single day. This lack of privacy even extends to the government, which is constantly usurping rights and slowly taking away all of our right to privacy.

For instance camera surveillance has become an imperative part of security. Cameras are everywhere, at stop lights or tolls, or outside of buildings, or even looking over your neighborhood parks. The jobs of these cameras is to moniter the public and make sure all rules are being followed. They have their eye on us at all times, which is kinda creepy. However sometimes you may think you are being watched when actually you are not.

This is called panopticism, which stems from the prison design theory Panopticon. It creates the illusion of being observed and therefore makes the person behave accordingly. It therefore does not matter if you are actually being observed as long as the individual internalizes the belief that they are being watched. The government can than use dummy cameras or not actually watch the footage because the cameras are there basically for the effect. They make a person believe that they are being watched and the person will than follow the rules because they do not want to get caught.

Boundaries

In the book Planet of Slums, written by Mike Davis he writes about the different boundaries that are built into a city system, some not even visibly so. According to Davis there are two different types of boundaries, hard and soft. Both types of boundaries are put in place to exclude certain individuals from certain areas. The unwanted people are usually lower class, homeless, or deviants who give a bad image to the surrounding area.

A hard boundary is one that is visibly built into the environment. Los Angeles is a city that has many visible hard boundaries. This is most likely because of the high levels of homelessness and poverty that are present in LA. Some things that the government did to physically exclude the homeless were change the seats at bus stops. They were all changed from benches to round tube like seats. This was done to make sleeping on the benches uncomfortable and to prevent the homeless from doing so. Another major example of a hard boundary is the road system in LA. The highways were built to divide communities and isolate the homeless into a centralized area. They isolated the old downtown that had become overrun with homeless and poor and built a new and improved one. The homeless became isolated because with the new highway system a car is absolutely necessary. They were no longer as visible and are not considered as much of a problem. This is a textbook example of a hard boundary because roads are a physical entity that is built into the environment, which is exactly what a hard boundary is.

A soft boundary is less visible. It is present and still built into the environment but not as clear. Examples of a soft boundary would be when a private officer patrols a public area. They really have no authority yet they refuse to allow "certain" people into public areas because they are considered undesirable. Another soft boundary would be a fenced in grassy area where it is not permitted to walk on. This fence creates a boundary excluding people from entry.

Modernism Vs. Postmodernism

Modernism existed up until the 1970's. It was a period of strict social order, in fact everything had to be in order. It was a very common ideaology in America during the transition from World War I to World War II. People in America saw it as a rebuilding time and felt that everything needed to b erestructered, includign urban areas. Sciene and engineering were important aspects of modernist thought. It was important to use advances in technology and science to help reshape and improve their everyday lives.

Once the 70's came around things started to change. There was a rebellion against modernist thought, people no longer wanted to live strict, regimented lives. This new notion was called Post- Modernism. People were so sick of the restricted lifestyle that they wanted to move to a state of disorganization and deconstruction. It was a cultural and intellectual revolution that changed the way people lived, there was no longer such a sense of strict social order. In this conceptual chart it is easier to see the differences between the two ideas. It outlines the cultural views that each side wholes on certain topics. For example when it comes to sexuality in a postmodern world one has the right to choose their own sexuality. It is a much freer and expecting envirovment. In contrast the modernist ideas on sexuality are based around God's teachings. God outlines the right and wrong ways that sexuality is portrayed.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism, a rebellion against the suppressing values of the modernist world.

Suburbia: A Bourgeois Utopia

According to what we learned in class suburbia was a result of industrialization and the transportation theory. The middle class had the funds and now the technological ability to commute from outside the city. According to Robert Fishman “suburbia was, rather, the collective creation of the Anglo-American middle class: the bourgeois utopia”. He bases his theory on suburbia’s creation around 18th century London. Suburbia is not a modern construction; Fishman shows that it evolved from 18^th century views on the degrading conditions of the city.

They were rapidly becoming extremely overcrowded and the cities were not capable of handling this influx of people. During the Evangelical movement the city was portrayed as a place of sin and degradation that was not suitable for a bourgeois family to inhabit. This new negative portrayal of the city made the bourgeois rethink their insistence upon living in it, they slowing began to leave the city and turn to the countryside to raise their families. This is when the real birth of suburbia was, it was a cultural movement rather than a conscious decision. This shift has left a permanent imprint upon society and our cities are still structured around this model.

Basically Fishman gives the same reasons for suburbanization but in a different time period. We learned it from the Western or American perspective, showing its emergence in the 1950 and 60's. Both cited overcrowding of the city and lesser liver conditions. As well as discussing an easy commute, that made the move seem logical. It gave the middle class a place to lead the luxurious lifestyle that they craved without being surrounded by the poor. Essentially they isolated themselves from the city they created. This leads me to believe that suburbia happens wherever there is a city over time. Eventually the middle class flee the city and give it up to commerce and the poor. It even happens in modern times, in this blog the suburbanization of the waterfront in NYC is an issue. That is a modern day suburbanization, proving that it has been going on and will continue to go on.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/08/28/the-suburbanization-of-nycs-waterfront/

Hoboken....The Edgecity

I recently visited Hoboken, which is a small city in New Jersey right on the outskirts of Manhattan. In fact to get into New York City all you have to do is hop on The Path and it’s a ten minute subway ride and you will find yourself in Penn Station. Hoboken is all of one square mile but it is a bustling city all on its own. It is filled with young adults, usually fresh out of college, who are trying to make it on their own for the first time. It is now considered a hip and fresh place for college grads to go and the atmosphere shows this. Bars are on every street and 27 year olds rule the city, walking around causing mayhem of all sorts. Each apartment has a “backyard” or a small piece of a courtyard to spruce up any way the owners want. Every set of apartments has a courtyard in the back of it that the different apartment buildings share and it forms a fun sense of community. One can see into everyone elses backyard yet it is not too intrusive that there is no privacy.

Once returning to Fairleigh I shared my Hoboken experience with my suitemates and told them that I thought it seemed like a great place for us to continue our style of living once we graduate college. I explained to them that it was almost like a suburb outside the city that still gave its occupants a city life feeling. After class on Tuesday I found a name for Hoboken, an Expolis. This means that the Central Business District has exploded like a zit as Haskaj would say. It has become too overcrowded for the one small area to handle and has spread out all around the CBD. This causes many multi-pole cities and cities on the edge. Hoboken would be one of these cities on the edge, and edgecity (tough terminology right?). While discussing these different types of city expansion Hoboken popped right into my head. I had been wondering what it would be considered because it is not really a suburb even though it is a town on the outskirts of the city. It has too many components of an actual city and fits perfectly into the Edgecity definition.

Hoboken in general is a very fun place and if you are looking to find out more about the city check out this blog.

http://thehobokenjournal.blogspot.com/2009/03/peter-cammarano-denounces-state.html

It discusses all sorts of political, social, and economic issues that face the residents of Hoboken today.

Deindustrialization

Up until the 1960’s the cities flourished, they were very populated and continued to grow. However once the 1960s hit all that changed and the big question was WHY?

Well there are multiple reasons for this sudden economic restructuring of the cities. Prior to the 60’s the US was a highly industrialized country. Every city was filled with factories and high levels of production. The ways in which items were produced is completely different then today. Than they had a “beginning to end” mentality, industries controlled every aspect of what was put into the product. They did not have to outsource in order to come up with a completed product. During the 60’s is when the shift in production occurred. Companies began to outsource and no longer needed as much factory strength and therefore began to close up their factories. Production became differentiated and dispersed.

With this change low-skilled labor was no longer in such high demand. Blue collar workers were not as necessary and white collar workers became much more in demand. Managerial staff and overseers were the jobs that were needed. This deindustrialization had a great affect upon the cities. Most white collar workers already lived on the outskirts of the cities but even more began to migrate to the suburbs leaving the poor and unemployed behind in the inner cities. This made the inner cities even less attractive and there was no pull factor for other people. No one wanted to move into the cities.

Not only were white collar workers moving to the suburbs but the companies were moving as well. They were taking their industries to the outskirts as well and this led to a complete shift in the US economy. The deindustrialization of the cities along with the automobile and the highway system helped to reinforce the decentralization of the cities and the increasing density of the suburbs.

The Automobile

The past few classes have been centered on the decentralization of the cities and the migration to the suburbs. There was also the development of a new type of city, the MMR or multi-centered metro region. This means that the city no longer has one central business district but instead has multiple centers and central areas. The development of the MMR would not be possible if it had not been for the automobile. The automobile is a major cause of the decentralization because it made commuting possible. People were now able to commute to and from work in the cities and they no longer had to live there. This made it possible for the upper classes to move out of the cities and form new communities in the outer areas of the city. For example when the automobile was invented it made it possible for the people who lived in New York City to move out to Long Island or up to West Chester, even as far as the Poconos and still make their living in the city.

When the NDSH Act of 1956 was passed it created millions of highways and parkways so that the automobile could actually get people around. This was also a big cause of the decentralization of the cities. Highways were going all over the place and made commuting even easier which just increased the MMR. Today automobiles are still a major part of life, I live on Long Island and see hundreds of people commuting to the city on a daily basis.

Sidewalks and their Many Purposes

Growing up I always remember my mom telling me to stay on the sidewalk, stepping off the sidewalk was considered a huge offense. When I was just starting to learn how to ride a bike it was on the sidewalk, walking to and from school was done on the sidewalk, even walking two houses down to my best friend’s house was on the sidewalk. I was always told that this was because I had to be careful and avoid the fast dangerous cars on the big bad street. According to Jane Jacobs that is one of the purposes of a sidewalk, to keep people at a safe distance from the cars, but there are two other underlying effects.

Contact and assimilating children to their environments are other reasons for the existence on the sidewalk. Sidewalks help to bring the people of the city together in intimate settings that force them to come into contact with one another. It is the sort of contact that city people could appreciate; one is able to come into contact with other people without allowing them into their private life. The people around them are comfortable because they are not too involved. This is good for city dwellers because their privacy is one of the most valuable aspects of city life.

Sidewalks also play an important role in the life of city children. Jane Jacobs argues that parks and underused sidewalks are areas that children are supposedly “safe” but in actuality are not. The parks are actually dangerous for children because there is less adult supervision, in some cases non at all. This gives children leeway to bully other children and to wreak havoc in general. Jacobs gives one example where she observes a park where two boys beat up on a little girl. A few blocks down there is a group of 28 children playing on a sidewalk without any squabbles. She accredits this to the fact that the sidewalk also contains a bustle of adults going about their daily lives, they help to keep order amongst the children. This sidewalk would be classified a lively sidewalk and this is a safe area for children to play because there are many people around, however underused sidewalks can be just as dangerous as the parks. The sidewalk was also able to support the large gaggle of children because it was sufficiently wide enough, narrow sidewalks and streets are what keep students in the parks and streets and keeps them in danger. This is due to poor city planning, Jacobs argues that the ways the cities are constructed lead to crime and deviant behavior but that’s for a whole other post.

Check out further discussions of Jane Jacobs arguments in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” at this fellow blog.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/260

The Gemeinschaft versus the Geselleschaft

According to Tonnies there are two different types of communities, the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft. The Gemeinschaft is a small, tight knit community where everyone knows one another. Rural areas or small towns would best represent a gemeinschaft community. Resources are shared amongst each other and they are completely self-sufficient, supplying each other with food and clothes and shelter. There is no need to reach outside the community because all needs can be met within it. The people who live in gemeinschaft communities also have very similar mentalities, since they are all located in such a small area and are not exposed to outside influences than it is somewhat inevitable that this should happen. It is for this reason also that the people are wanted for work in factories. They are extremely interchangeable since they share all the same skills, values, and thoughts. They represent mechanical solidarity.

Those living in a Gesellschaft community represent organic solidarity. They are focused more on personal gain and private property than helping out the larger community. It is a more contract society, focusing on deals that can better ones personal wealth. The people living in a gesellschaft community are also much more individualistic, they do not all share the same values and opinions as the gemeinschaft people do. The people are also much more specialized, they have special skills in one area and because of that naturally have to depend on one another for resources. Since they are not skilled in many areas they cannot provide for themselves as well as those in gemeinschaft. They have to resort to trade and bartering to gain goods and resources. In essence they are all free from one another, yet still bound to each other.


Here there are further explanations of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/228066/Gemeinschaft-and-Gesellschaft

The Metropolis and Mental Life

Living in a urban setting can be very strenuous on a persons mental health. Constantly being surrounded by people, noise, commotion, and crowds can cause one to feel stifled, anxious, and useless. A person uses less mental energy to process lasting impressions, ones that happen more often and regularly. It takes more energy to process the rapid changes that occur during urban life. Even walking from block to block takes more mental energy than someone living in a small town walking down their street. A person in a small town knows all their neighbors and surrounding very well whereas a person in the city could have the same neighbor for ten years and not recognize them from a hole in the wall.

Since city dwellers have to process so much more and are consuming more mental energy they tend to react on a lesser emotional level than those who live in rurality. They are less sensitive and more removed from their personality. This removal from emotional reactions has given city dwellers a reputation for being cold hearted, rude, obnoxious, and even violent sometimes. In reality they are just adapting to city life, to the sensory overload and can no longer process stimuli in the same way as a small town person.

City dwellers and small town folk often share a mutual aversion to one another. This seems to have a lot to do with them not understanding each others reactions to situations. City dwellers have to have less emotional reactions in order to survive the constant stimuli from their environment whereas small town people can react emotionally becasue they are receiving less stimuli. They are all just surviving in their environments.