Discriminating Streets12
Aug 7, 2020Why is there so much bad urban design? How can we make our streets more welcoming to everyone? Is the perfect city merely a mirage? This week on the show we’re asking whether streets can discriminate, and how we can design our cities so they are more just.
Comments (4)
Tim Smith
Monday, August 10, 2020 -- 6:26 AM
We are not going to designWe are not going to design our way out of discrimination, especially in a conversation and blog post picture that seems to imply good design of a park bench is to serve as a bed for the homeless. This is the same mistaken premise that foists social work onto our police, and I might add anarchists at our police stations.
Social injustice needs fundamental justice that respects human rights, not design criteria. Great design helps, but we're polishing turds here not rewriting the constitution. Turd polishing has ever, will ever, be the duty of design.
Pig lipstick.
Daniel
Friday, November 18, 2022 -- 3:24 PM
On the condition that it beOn the condition that it be of some benefit to the pig. How that benefit is determined informs any claimed legitimacy of its application. Take the argument you make in the first paragraph. Assuming one can sleep on a park bench and treating police as though they were babysitters for the maladjusted are brought under the category of flawed assumptions, since a bench is designed to sit on and police to treat criminal activity. Presuming use contrary to design is unproductive, and therefore flawed. Your second premise however I take to be decisive: If a flawed expectation is not fulfilled, what is the response in those who possess it? The answer you provide is clear: Rather than adjusting their expectations to the constraints of design, they instead dismantle the product, to wit, push over park benches, or, in the example given, attack police stations. And this indicates that the assumptions are not only flawed in the reasoning of the individual, but also toxic in the context of her or his community. How then does a mere epistemic oversight become a degradation of society? Your analysis here is quite good in my view, but needs elaboration. What's the importance, for example, of artificial fabrication here? Could an object of natural production, say a tree, be similarly misinterpreted in its design?
Harold G. Neuman
Friday, November 18, 2022 -- 6:17 AM
I do not know if streetsI do not know if streets discriminate, unless one specifies ghetto streets. In that case, yes, probably so, and, depending on who you are and who you know, you probably don't want to test your welcome by going there. There is a different take on this, an advertisement of certain benefits that may be available, depending on one's residential zip code. I do not know if this is a scam, but it clearly aimed towards elder people, race and sex notwithstanding. The ad constantly bombards network television.
A fine print disclaimer says it is not connected with any government agency or program (ding!)
I have no interest in this come-on, legitimate or not. My benefits are fine, thanks. (Ding!)
Daniel
Sunday, January 22, 2023 -- 5:29 PM
So tell me if I'm correct, ifSo tell me if I'm correct, if in your generosity of spirit you might deign to enrich my own in its impoverishment, if the interpretation is made that you are making an analogy here: As a ghetto is to a visitor, the Medicare Advantage program is to the elderly. Apparently there's a lot of different versions of the latter, which constitute ways to get people off Medicare, a government program, and onto a private, for profit system. It's misleading because it leads one to suppose that it's somehow connected with the distributive social program, by using the name and claiming there's additional parts to it that only the private companies can provide. My problem is how it connects back to the first part of the analogy. Are you saying that visitors to the neighborhoods in question would be approached with offers having to do with things outside of it? Or do you mean to suggest that what is offered to the visitor would be things within the neighborhood which are purported to be better versions of what is already possessed in their own? Certainly it's the case that one who wants to keep their government program would not be welcomed by those who want to get rid of it, but it remains unclear about how a welcome-test in a foreign neighborhood equates to one in the context of a private system hostile to a public one.