Jane Jacobs died this week. I read this in the USA Today that was delivered to my Houston hotel room. An interesting counterpoint, since what I've seen of this city embodies everything she reviled. The place is an inhuman scale -- vast distances across heat-shimmered parking lots to get a coffee, sidewalks for "decoration" that go nowhere, zebra stripes under enormous chrome arches across the street that seem to render pedestrians invisible. An enormous mall that the locals are very proud of -- The Galeria! -- that sells kate spade bags and $800 manolo blahniks but no advil or sunblock. I ask someone to help me ("I'm Canadian and don't know these brands -- which of these stores is a drugstore?") -- and hear "oh, you won't find something like that in this fancy mall."
I went for a 40 minute run my first day here and literally encountered only these people on the street: a mexican nanny with a plush white baby; mexican men trying to jump start a decrepit truck; one white guy training for a cycling race; one older white man exercise walking; sherrifs directing traffic. The place is shiny and hard-surfaced, and people are affable and friendly, and it just gives me the willies.
It's been a good school week, though. Very rich conversations about my dissertation project, and I'm starting to hone in on what I need to do. It's bizarre to me how the container for these conversations is always these portals into unexamined US society -- gated communities, affluent neighbourhoods that are completely dependent on illegal immigrant labour, class and race polarization. I caused a fight on my online forum after the quasi-anxiety attack I felt in that Galeria by pouncing on a Texan's smug "I love my SUV" comment. I start to understand eco-psychology when I spend time in these places -- the notion that we are so distanced from our embodied sense of self/connection to the earth that we don't know how to make systemic or thoughtful decisions. I feel like I'm struggling to figure out how to make that framework more articulable -- and it's unbelievably alien in this environment.
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I've never been to Houston, buy the management for the company I work at is increasingly centered there. This city I don't know has come to represent a harsh new climate, depersonalization, consolidation of power into the hands of the few. All of this connected to our distance from each other, from the earth, from all of the good smells that remind us of our animal selves.
You didn't start the fight, either. It was gonna happen, you just added some wise words to it.
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