One of my favorite things about the Star Wars extended universe are all of the extra planets that have been written into existence. Amongst all of the forest moons, oceanic sprawls and desert planets, the one that stands out the most to me is the Urban Sprawl that is Taris. Taris is a planet that is entirely consumed by one, humongous, city. What is most interesting about Taris is that the city is constructed in 4 levels, each of which is designated for a different socioeconomic class. Just as we call classes upper, middle and lower, the city is split into three levels bearing these names.

            The first section of the city, going physically from the top down, is the Upper-City. This section of the city is for elite humans, it enjoys the most fresh air and sunlight as there are few buildings that tower over it and it is relatively uncongested. In the Star Wars universe, aliens occupy the role that ethnic minorities do in our society today, needless to say, there are no aliens living in the uppercity.

            The next section of the city is the middle-city, this section is slightly lower down than the upper city but still sees relative amounts of sunlight and breathable clean air. This section is highly congested and has an extremely high population density as it is populated by the working class. There is much traffic and most people live in one of the millions of standardized apartment buildings. Aliens are more commonly seen on this level, but they are actively discriminated against and struggle everyday just to stay on their feet.

            The next level down is the lower-city, while the two levels above it are policed by a rather strong military presence, the lower-city is generally lawless. It is run by rival gangs who compete in swoop bike races, which is a modified Star Wars version of drag racing. The lower-city is extremely dangerous and many people work hard in the hopes of being able to move to the middle-city, although opportunities are very limited. If one wishes to survive here, he or she is forced to engage in illegal activities, legal work is few and far between. It is very common here to see aliens and humans living side-by-side with very low levels of discrimination as can be evidenced by the thriving cantinas and multi-species gangs. The lower-city sees no natural light, and is located completely underground.

             Finally, comes the most interesting part of Taris: The Undercity. The Undercity is located far underneath the massive city above, and lies amongst the cities gigantic foundation. It is made up of small encampments that are surrounded by what is seemingly an endless black void. The Undercity was initially conceived as a play where Taris would abandon its most horrendous members of society who committed egregious crimes, that plan has long been abandoned however. The people that live in the undercity now are the descendents of the people who were initially cast out of society, they are referred to as the “outcasts.” Their tiny towns resemble what would today be thought of as a horrible slum and the people that live there grow up knowing that they will never be allowed to leave. They make their livings by scavenging through the sewers of Taris and begging for food and money from people who come down from the city above on excavations. The undercity can only be accessed by a long elevator that is policed by the Tarisian military. If one was to transplant an outcast into the world above, he or she would have no knowledge of any of the going-ons, technologies or the customs of above, it is a truly pitiful existence.

            Whoever came up with the concept for Taris must have meant to create a striking social commentary, and they succeeded. Anybody who would like to experience Taris first hand should get their hands on a copy of the videogame Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic… man that’s a great game.

I just typed a whole entry and then it sent me back to the login in screen and dissappeared... was that supposed to happen?

I thought I would address a topic that we talk about a good deal in one of my other classes: residential segregation. We have all seen those maps illustrating such segregation. What's hidden within the maps is the variation (or lack thereof) between impoverished blacks and the black middle-class. The gains of the black middle-class in terms of income and educational attainment are undermined by their increased proximity to concentrated poverty relative to their white counterparts. As with most racial issues, the explanation is historical. The lingering effects of de jure segregation, such as intergenerational wealth inequality, mean that middle-class individuals are unable to utilize the same resources in housing as similarly situated whites. Further, recent studies suggest that racial steering practices (in which realtors withhold houses from certain interested parties) continue to affect the black middle-class disproportionately. 

An article (Karyn R. Lacy - "black spaces, black places: strategic assimilation and identity construction in middle-class suburbia") that was recently assigned for class highlights the role of an understudied factor in the persistence of residential segregation: racial identity construction. Lacy examines two groups of the black middle-class. One group lives in a majority black neighborhood while the other lives in a majority white neighborhood. The biggest difference between the groups is their emphasis upon racially-distinct places. Parents that choose to live in the majority black neighborhood feel that they can better shield their children from the effects of subtle discrimination, as well as demonstrate the value of a black racial identiy. For these individuals, a racially homogenous neighborhood is seen as the best way to maintain group membership. The middle-class blacks living within the majority white neighborhood feel that they can maintain and express their identity through participation in racially homogenous organizations and clubs. For them, the benefits of participation in majority white institutions are worth the risk of discriminatory interaction. To summarize, Lacy's finding suggests that continued residential segregation results (at least given the historical boundary setting of de jure segregation) in part from a willingness to construct racial identity through residence in racially-distinct places. 

            The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the more intriguing stories to take place since the fall. An interesting part of this movement is its use of place and space. The encampment at Zucotti Park in the Wall Street section of New York City provided a central location for people to gather at the heart of the problem: Wall Street. With tents, sleeping bags and a large concentration of people, Zucotti Park resembled a refugee camp. Make no mistake, though, even though they had temporarily left their homes, the 99% were able to enjoy many of the comforts of home including, free wi-fi Internet, a library, and a five-star soup kitchen that turned out organic chicken and spaghetti Bolognese one night. Many of the cities neediest 99%, the homeless, began showing up in the camps primarily for the food, only to be kicked out by the protestors. This creates a place that the bookends of society – the wealthy and the poor – are shunned from.

            The police have a noticeable presence at a lot of the bigger Occupy locations and often clash with the protestors. Earlier this week, these two groups had a confrontation at McPherson Square in D.C. This was sparked by protestors’ refusal to dismantle a wooden structure they had set up without a permit. This is very interesting because it brings up and important development with place and space. Often symbolized by objects that represented movement, or a fleeting nature – tents, sleeping bags, tarps, etc. – the Occupy movement is now attempting to create more permanent structures. These Occupy camps have become incredibly important because they are as important as the people in them. Like the bigger cities around them, these camps have their own character and a unique sense of place, one founded more on an idea than anything else. It will be interesting to see what new structures pop up and what clues they offer to regarding the direction of this movement.

 In a world where the food system has become consolidated, industrialized, and globalized, Mark Lapping described how this creates “an acute loss of a sense of the local.” He describes several alternative agro-food models (AAFMs) that have been successful in the United States. I want to focus on how typical food shopping in France can contribute to some similar benefits.

I studied abroad in Paris last fall, where I lived downtown with my host mother. Paris is known for many of its open-air famers markets, one of my personal favorite places to go on Sunday mornings. But even in situations when Parisians aren’t buying directly from the farmer, the considerable smaller percentage of consolidation that in the U.S., definitely adds a community aspect to doing the groceries.   

Large supermarket chains, known as hypermarchés, do exist in France, just as they do here. However, from my experience they’re not used to the same degree. Artisanal culture is still thriving in France, and it is not uncommon for the family shopper to visit several local shops or markets each week to get different food products, instead of going to the supermarket. To get your bread, you go to la boulangerie, but for your sweeter pastries you go to la pâtisserie. La fromagerie is for cheese, la rôtisserie is for chicken, la charcuterie is for pork, and la boucherie is your typical butcher. Finally there is l’épicerie, small general stores that sell produce and dry goods. What’s even more interesting than the collection of small shops, is the fact that many didn’t even have distinct names. The name of my host mother’s favorite bakery was simply la boulangerie. However the fact that a different person or family owns each small shop helps establish them as places that get incorporated to the community.

This style of shopping further enhances the sense of community because repeat patrons are able to create relationships with the small business owners. My host mother would often refer the shop owners by name, and there was a sense of trust between her and her vendors. She counted on them for quality and better service. This kind of shopping may seem to be more time consuming, but the density of small shops means one never has to go farther than a couple blocks. So though it takes more effort than Americans are used to, it is definitely a more personal and social experience. I think that this helps to construct a stronger sense of place in each neighborhood.

As a temporary French citizen, I found this kind of local neighborhood shopping influenced my practice of place. Although I wasn’t there for long enough to create as strong relationships with the vendors, I became a regular at a few small shops in the area, and came to trust the quality there. So while the city is already divided into 20 neighborhoods (arrondissements), my neighborhood was definitely defined in respect to these small shops more that the fact that I lived in the 5^th arrondissement. Instead of shopping at a huge Hannaford’s, that I had to drive to, in Paris, shopping for food in a more local, connected setting contributed to creating my concept of neighborhood, and my ability experience the culture. 

 Several hours ago, I read an advertisement that said: "The internet is the best place to buy an engagement ring." I paused. Are there simply no other linguistic alternative for this advertiser to tell people to buy things on the internet, or is the internet perhaps a place? This is weird, right? Even as I attempt to talk about the internet I can't avoid prepositional phrases like "on the internet," or "from the internet." Let's not forget about the term "cyberspace," either. It may be hard to think of the internet as a place, but it's equally difficult to nail it down as something concretely not a place. 

Consider: We used to shop in stores, now we shop on the internet. We used to get our mail from at the end of the driveway, now we get it on the internet. We used to play games in physical spaces with physical people, now competitors together occupy some sort of virtual common visual space and interact, despite being a million miles apart. Regardless of how you personally consider the internet, it's impossible to deny that we talk about it as if it were a place. 

Maybe it's possible to think of the internet as the very antithesis of place, but don't we feel the same kinds of familiarity with web locations that we do with places, as Professor Cannavo defines in his book? We navigate through them and even become upset when they are changed. What's more is that the internet as a virtual place is growing and, as Charlie Stross points out, permeating the physical world and blurring lines between what is virtual and what is actual:

Welcome to a world where the internet has turned inside-out; instead of being something you visit inside a box with a coloured screen, it’s draped all over the landscape around you, invisible until you put on a pair of glasses or pick up your always-on mobile phone. A phone which is to today’s iPhone as a modern laptop is to an original Apple II; a device which always knows where you are, where your possessions are, and without which you are — literally — lost and forgetful.

The Hamilton Admissions Office was recently applauded for printing a minimalist admissions poster that had only the name of the college and a quick response code. Anyone without a smart phone was left high and dry by this poster, but it's being hailed as progressive and forward thinking. 

So what to make of this? Are the two polarities of place--the real and the virtual--becoming one? What does this mean for our sense of relationship with the physical landscape? I can't help but wonder where we will be in ten years.

A lot of the inspiration from this post came from here.

My town made a place out of a parking lot. In many of the class conversations and the class readings parking lots are portrayed as the ideal representation of abstract space.  They meet the qualifications of space as laid out in The Working Landscape by Peter Cannavò. Parking lots are quantifiable and repetitive with neat lines laid out in perfect rows. It is assumed that parking lots have no history and no character of their own. But in my expierience I have seen something different. I think that in class we have sometimes focused too much on the role of the physical features of a place in creating community and meaning. In my town it was the community that made what could have been seen as an empty meaningless space into one of the most recognizable and appreciated places in the whole town. This space consists of three parking lots in a large shopping center. Surrounding the parking lots are a few stores that are townie favorites, a Starbucks, a tex-mex restaurant called Baja, and a Blockbuster. Two of the three of these stores are chain stores but to us they didn’t feel homogenous and placeless. They were the stores where our friends worked and hung out; it was our Starbucks and our Blockbuster. But the parking lots were so much more than the stores that surrounded them. The youth of my neighborhood founded the parking lots and named them “town.”

“Town” is much more then a space. It is the place to be on a Friday or a Saturday night. It is a meeting place where you can be sure to run into many different groups of people that you know. Now that I am in college, “town” has become a place to go if I want to see someone I haven’t seen since high school. People park their cars and stand in multiple circles throughout the parking lot. They roam from circle to circle for the chance to run into someone they know. “Town” is a distinctive place that requires its own social rules, activities, and name. It was the community of high school kids that created it, not of the politicians that created the zoning laws, or of the CEOs who decided to place chain stores in the strip mall surrounding it. It was my community that created a place out of a parking lot. 

 http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/12/01/americas-saddest-cities/?tsp=1#1971-5

All of the news about Zuccotti Park because of Occupy Wall Street has gotten me thinking about Privately Owned Public Space (POPS). In 1961, a zoning incentive program was created in New York City. It encouraged private developers to create public spaces in or around their buildings in exchange for being allowed to make buildings taller than the zoning of an area would otherwise allow. Since the launch of the program, more than 3.5 million square feet of public space have been created (albeit with varying levels of success). Zuccotti Park, a POPS created in 1968, is currently owned and maintained by Brookfield Properties. The fact it is a POPS means that it does not close at night like most public parks, which is part of why it was chosen by Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Without getting into the politics of the protest (and whether it was legal, or right or wrong for the park to be cleared two weeks ago for cleaning), this has made me think about the unique ownership of POPS. While the owners of POPS do technically own the spaces and are responsible for maintaining them, they do not have the same rights that private property owners do. Likewise, the people who use POPS do not have any ownership over them, but are allowed to use them in ways that they could not use private property. So who has the more meaningful ownership of the space? Who gets to define the terms of the space—the people who build it or the people who chose to use it?

It can really go either way, but here, I think the Occupy Wall Street protesters demonstrate that it’s the latter. The owners can design a space and hope that the public will use it as planned. However, unless an activity is illegal, the owners have no actual say in how the public uses the space. The public can re-found the space as something completely different than what the owners planned and make it their own.

Over the summer I had read an article in the New York Times about the “building invasion movement” in Venezuela.  Its an interesting example of refounding through the pioneer efforts of squatters.

In the 1990s, wealthy horse breeder, David Brillembourg, built the Centro Financiero Confinanzas in the city of Caracas.  The 45-story skyscraper was intended to stand as a symbol of Venezuela’s “entrepreneurial mettle.”  Due to the banking crisis of 1994 the building was never completed.  The crisis also resulted in a housing shortage which forced squatters to move into empty buildings throughout the city, including the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, now nicknamed the Tower of David.

Today, over 2,500 squatters have made their homes within the Tower of David.  The building lacks basic amenities and in most areas even walls.  However, current inhabitants have created living spaces within the building’s skeleton and even improved living standards by rigging electricity and running water as high as the 27^th floor.  Despite the treacherous conditions, the squatters live rather safely.  They have organized themselves.  There is a building coordinator, sentries to guard the entrances, and no gangs. 

The Tower of David now symbolizes something different than before.  It currently stands as a reminder of the ruin faced by Caracas, “once one of Latin America’s most developed cities.”  What had been founded as a planned commercial building to exhibit the strength of the city had recently been refounded by displaced Venezuelans for unplanned, unintended purposes.  However, as one squatter relates, “There’s opportunity in this tower.” Many see the building’s new purpose as hopeful.

We read in Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places of the revitalization of formerly prosperous cities through squatters who acted as the “pioneer species” or “first succession” inhabitants in particular urban locations like SoHo and Brooklyn.  Taking into account that the Venezuelan government is currently at a stand-still in addressing the housing issue (they have made little effort to remove the squatters from the Tower of David, but they have also not aided those living within the building) and that many of the squatters have jobs within the city, I would be curious to see how this story plays out and if the squatters have any effect on the redevelopment of Caracas as had the squatting hipsters on the development of New York. 

Information from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/americas/01venezuela.html?pagewanted=all

Picture from http://rssbroadcast.com/?p=34967