All posts by imay
Hill Top Coffee and Mental Maps
25 years old; teacher; lives in East End; lived here 3 years.
23 years old; environmental engineer; commutes from North Deering; grew up here.
24 years old; waste collector- compost; Pre-Eastend; 5 years here; This is where his projects are and his friends; Wishes that public consumption were legal
Age:24; Medical Assistant; lived in Portland 12 years for great quality of life; wants cheaper rent and better bike lanes.
So the first thing that I notice is that everyone is white and between the ages of 20 and 40. there is one older person who appears to be about 60. He is the only person who is overweight at all. The others are all very fit. About 80% of the people in here are women. about 15 people in the shop. A couple pairs of people are talking. the guy next to me is drawing. several people including the older man is reading. Most people have some kind of beverage in front of them. some do not though.
The first black lady just walked in. She ordered a coffee and sat down. She has some sizeable head wrap on. Demographics still very different than the city of Portland.
The lady next to me got up and left. she was a 25-30 year old fit white lady in a chic coat. She threw her cup in the trash can and walked out the door without saying anything. The guy next to me is still drawing in his little notebook. I think he is drawing someone on the other side of the room.
A middle aned white man walks in and orders a coffee. He stands and waits for it. So far it has been about 50/50 people waiting at the counter for their coffee and people sitting down and standing back up again to go get it. I have not noticed if there is some trend about the demeanor of the people waiting where.
The people who are talking over at the other table are talking about giving people leadership in an organization. One seems to be the other’s mentor or something. Certainly a position of authority within the same organization. Both are women and it is not clear what organization they are talking about.
One of the a baristas is going to town with that broom around the large coffee grinders. She has been sweeping everywhere, but they have not been using those grinders since I got in here a while ago at this point so I wonder what she is sweeping up.
I go inquire about the WIFI. One of the three baristas sitting behind the counter says that it does not work and that none of them no why. My efforts to do work while in the shop are foiled. I go ask the man next to me to draw a mental map. He takes about ten minutes to do so.
A pair just walked in presumably a man and his daughter. She appears to be about 12. She is the first child I have seen in this whole part of Portland. The man ordered a coffee and is now loitering around the counter. I could not tell if the girl got something to drink as well. It does not appear as though she did.
An older white lady just walked in. she ordered a coffee and left. A couple have done that. The older folks seem to prefer to take their coffee with them than sit around in the shop itself.
Someone has decided that it is acceptable to talk on the phone very loudly in the middle of a coffee shop as though there were no one else there. She will not get off.
A middle aged man walked in in a jacket. he ordered a large something or other and came and sat down next to me. I think he may see me writing this. Awkward.
Dude next to me just busted out a huge drawing pad and a macbook pro. Six pencils and an iphone6 maybe plus.
Next to me are two dudes drawing. one with a brand new iphone the other with a verizon flip phone. The younger one has the worse phone and looks like it is all he can afford. the other guy’s appearance fits his iphone.
He too seems to think it is ok to just gab away on the phone as though no one else cared to enjoy the serenity of a hot cup of coffee and hipster music.
Now three people are on the phone.
The first small child just entered the store with his parents presumably. They got a couple cups of coffee while he ran around and made faces at the patrons. They left.
Several more people are now drawing stuff. Lots of drawing in the cafe.
The older gentleman is now messing with stuff.He seems to have a box of altoids that is filled with something else.
A couple probably in their late 20s just came in. They did not order a drink. They just sat down.
The guy who was sitting next to me (both of them) got up and were replaced by women. They are writing things. One of them is on here black berry.
In addition to the environmental engineer i just talked to there are several other people talking about environmental issues. They also worked at planned parenthood. This is likely a left wing place.
The people next to me are now German speaking. They speak very quietly and are dressed as though they were still out doors. the man appears younger than the woman but i believe they are married. Both wear rings.
Professor Gieseking just arrived. She is now ordering coffee.
The older gentleman is now leaving. Gieseking is likely to take his seat.
She did.
The German speaking couple has now gotten up. They are vacating the seat next to me.
Another woman has entered. She is very short.
There is a discussion of Boston navigation and the Liberty hotel in Boston. Also, there is a discussion of politics. Maine in particular. Opinions are left of center though not wildly so.
At this point I got up to ask a few people to do their mental mapping. While I did this, I noticed that many people were actually meeting up outside of the cafe and then entering. I thought this was particularly interesting because I cannot see why anyone would not just go in and sit down and wait for their companion there.
The people who entered from here on continued to be white in general. They also continued to be in their 20s and 30s.
In the entire time I was in and watching the building I noticed only two children under the age of 18. The whole area seems to be pretty light on children.
Transect Walk. The Way People Use Their Streets
My transect walk focused on the way residents used their space. That is to say, what the street life was like and how people seemed to interact with their surroundings. I think the weakness of this topic is that it is completely dependent upon time of day. That is to say, when I walked was a confounding variable. Instead of examining different spaces, I saw a few locations in totally different circumstances. I started the transect walk at around 5pm on a saturday night and by the end, I was walking through a residential neighbourhood where it makes sense that there would not be any kind of substantial nightlife at 7pm.
So I started my walk at Monument Square Park in Old Port. Just as it was when we went on our class walk around Portland, the area was busy. It was saturday afternoon and it was still fairly warm so dozens of people were out and about. A few people were in the restaurants in the area, but by and large people seemed to be moving from place to place and not stopping in this part of the city.
From there I walked walked down Congress St. towards the southwest. Almost everyone I passed was moving. In this more built up part of the city, almost no one was standing and talking to people. They just kept moving from place to place. There were groups. None were stationary. Couples and small packs of people slid past one another without connecting or taking much time to notice one another. The most surprising thing to me was that no one seemed to enter the buildings on either side. I am not sure if they were tourists or if they simply hailed from another part of the city within walking distance.
As I moved away from the densest part of the city I went North slightly to get into a more residential neighborhood that Google Earth calls Parkside. Here there were fewer people on the street who moved less. Unlike the people in the shopping neighborhood to the South, the people here mostly would stand around on the corner. There were also more dogs.
As I approached Cumberland Ave, I realized that I was headed too far North to reach my eventual destination of the West End so I resumed my Southwesterly course. The environment remained much the same. Over time, it became clear I was entering a richer part of the city. Houses became larger, Yards too became larger. Really, they started to exist. I was surprised to find that as the buildings became more spread out and there was more green space, I saw fewer people. This remained true until I got to the Western Promenade. It had a number of walkers and even a few people rollerblading in it.
I returned back towards the Old Port Area along Bowdoin St and finally took Spring St all the way in to town. The walk back I noticed the same trends I saw on the way out. A zone of empty, then a zone of people mostly standing around though not nearly as large of one and finally people bustling about on some business.
On top of this, I did the walk in Mid-October so I do not think this experience will hold for other times of the year. Summer would have more tourists. Winter would have many fewer people. Professor Gieseking said that this should be a snapshot, and I think that I did that. It is a moment in time, but I do not know if this moment in time can be used to extrapolate anything about the city as a whole. Events were random and the sample size small.
I have a map with the locations marked where I went. I am working on posting it.
Infrastructure for Smaller Cities
I particularly liked some of what Sorkin said in his article about the dynamics of traffic in America today. I think that his critique of the system of avoidance makes a lot of sense, but I thought that he made some dubious assertions.
The problem comes from one section where he claims that public space creates public life and interaction.[1] We have, several times, discussed this in class and come up with examples where it is not true. My personal favorite is the subway or any other mass transit solution. Nothing is more public. Lots of people are packed into a small amount of space, but it does not increase the quality of life. People hate it. No one talks to each other and to do so would violate the unwritten rules society has created for that environment. It belies some of the problem with Sorkin’s reasoning. People are spread out and prefer to take their cars over other forms of transportation because they want to avoid unnecessary interaction. People prefer not to be forced to be with other people they do not know.
The best part of Sorkin’s piece is where he is basically talking about allocation of space. He thinks about the transportation system as doling out resources. Avoidance is a costly solution.[2] To prevent the different modes of mobility from interacting requires a huge amount of resources. Tunnels, elevated roads, all of that is costly and difficult to organize. The advantage is that it does make travel more efficient. The best way to have avoidance is what they did by closing down large parts of broadway. Large swaths of avoidance makes a lot more sense because that is the only way to achieve real efficiency in any area of transit. Interstates between cities, parks, and elevated trains are all efficient. They do not have problems with congestion because they avoid the other systems for long periods of time. Again, this is not available in cities. New York cannot close the entire lower half of Manhattan to cars even if that would increase foot-traffic.
[]Sorkin, Michael, “Introduction: Traffic in Democracy,” 412.
[]Sorkin, Michael, “Introduction: Traffic in Democracy,” 412.
A realistic look at gentrification
Neil Smith’s article on gentrification demonizes capitalism and gentrifiers without giving them a fair shake or even a voice. Instead of letting the actual people or their advocates speak for themselves, Smith builds straw men and pretends like it is the same.
“The poor and working class are all too easily defined as “uncivil,” on the wrong side of a heroic dividing line, as savages and communists. The substance and consequence of the new frontier imagery is to tame the wild city, to socialize a wholly new and therefore challenging set of processes into safe ideological focus. As such, the frontier ideology justifies monstrous incivility in the heart of the city.”[1] Clearly these are major claims, but if you hope that Smith will ever back them up, you will be disappointed. What he tries to pass off as arguments are nothing more than assertions. He does not present cases where people spoke this way or interviews with people who expressed this idea. All he does is set up a straw man that he easily labels as a racist.
But gentrification is not inherently racist. No more than my personal choice to move from one place to another. Let us grant for a moment that he is right, that people who gentrify communities use lots of frontier metaphors. It still is not inherently racist. The frontier is the frontier not because there are people there who are different, but because it is dangerous out there. Crime rates in New York were astronomical, often more than double what they are today. To say that it is only racism that makes rough parts of town similar to a frontier community is to deny that there are differences between neighborhoods other than race.
Smith is not just dissatisfied with capitalism in the US however. He is opposed to the use of capital abroad as well. “Immigrants come to the city from every country where US capital has opened markets, disrupted local economies, extracted resources, removed people from the land, or sent the marines as a ‘peace-keeping force.'” [2] Smith lets his curtain fall too far here. He admits that he is less interested in arguing his point than he is in attacking the capitalist system. With one breath he decries capitalism for going into neighborhoods and improving them, and with the next he blames capitalism for neighborhoods for getting bad in the first place. He does not bother to argue this second point either. He references articles, but never gives evidence or reasoning behind his claims.
It is also worth noting that he is just wrong. The foreign born population in the US has continued to rise since this article came out in 1996, but the “Third-Worlding”[3] he refers to has not taken place. Crime rates across the country are down not up, and this is in spite of a massive economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Repressive police action still exists but no clearing people out of neighborhoods. His causal story does not hold water. Even if there is use of frontier rhetoric, it has not had the horrible effects he said it would. Gentrification continues or even accelerates in this country, but race relations have certainly improved since 1996.
[1]Smith “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West” 316.
[2] Smith “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West” 318.
[3]Smith “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West” 318.
Pragmatic Parks
The smart city will not change publicly owned public spaces all that much for one simple reason. The way people use parks etc has not changed in the last hundred and fifty years. Maybe public wifi in a park will change the demographic from book readers to people on computers and phones, but that does not matter in any larger sense.
Neither Setha Lowe’s “rights” [1] nor Donald Mitchell’s rules for Marxist public spaces [2] take any heed of technology or the change it might bring. Public space is important because it is a physical gathering space for people. Everything else is secondary.Mitchell is so willing to make a park a place for public gathering that he is willing to walk a very fine line Marxist in favor of rights saying, “‘Rights’ must be at the heart of any Marxist and socialist project of urban transformation, even while the limits of rights, and the need to continually struggle over them, must constantly be acknowledged.” [3]
I think that this is one of the weakest parts of their arguments. Both demand complete public control over public spaces. The problem is that those techniques do not work. Walking through Portland there were many parks that were completely controlled by the public via the state and utterly unused. Unless you have an ideological understanding of what makes a park and public space “good” these parks are massive failures. No one goes to Lincoln Park not because it has somehow been corrupted by reduced public ownership. There is nothing to do there and the physical plant is falling apart. Only an ideologue would argue it is successful.
A public-private partnership is the alternative. The public sells part of its control of a public to private hands and in return gets a place people will use. I think the authors we have read deify the public and their unadulterated control and sacrifice short term gains to the public like having usable parks. Unlike a Parks Department, private enterprise can only make money if the public space is actively used. They are the only ones with real motivation to improve the space.
Maybe I am too cynical, but it genuinely seems like Mitchell does not care about the usefulness of public space.[4] He seems much more likely to think about it through the lens of Marxist revolution than from the average member of the public in a city like New York. If we want useful ideas about how to make our parks better, maybe we should get ideas from practical people instead of ideologues who only view things through bright red lenses.
- Setha Low, Spaces of Reflection, Recovery, and Resistance: Reimagining the Postindustrial Plaza165
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- Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 195.
- Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 195.
- Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 193.
Catwalks Between Buildings
Ideas:
1. gigabit internet
2. free public wifi
3. cat walks/tunnels to allow people to stay inside and still move around the city (see Duluth)
4. street cars
5. improved bus signage
One of the things i thought was most interesting from the city council meeting discussions were the refrences to joint public and private partnerships. In many cases, the payments for road improvements etc. were actually made by those who would benefit from teh construction and the government both. I feel like we see this in many cities also in public transport. Hong Kong’s subway system for example is privately owned entirely.
I feel like most of the ideas I listed above would have demonstrable impacts on the businesses in the area. For example, most of down town Portland is really nice to walk around during the summer. During the winter however, no one wants to walk outside to walk around the streets and move from building to building. Having a part of the city where each building fed into one another would make it much more popular when it is bitterly cold.
Portland City Council, September 15 meeting, 127.
The Politics of Infrastructure
One thing that I would like to explore over the course of the semester is both how politics drive the types of infrastructure within a city and the reverse. One of the topics Hayden touched on with collective mapping was how different groups understand their cities as governed by their abilities to move around them. Her example was Los Angeles where public transportation is a huge problem.[1] I feel like the political causes of public transportation are generally more examined than their consequences.
My hometown Nashville is experiencing something of a boom right now and is struggling with the expansion. One area of particular conflict is around public transport, and I wonder what the effects will be on the city if we do and do not invest in the expensive and elaborate infrastructure that seems more necessary each year. I would be very interested to look at the different possible directions the city could go.
Walking around Portland today raised even more questions about the accessibility of services. It is something that I have never considered before. The idea that the major departments would be inaccessible to the people who need them seems obvious now, but the needs of people who have no other means are difficult to accommodate. As we talked about the soup kitchen, bad neighborhoods are often intentionally chosen. Being both the cause of people living in one area and then depriving them the ability to reach the services seems unethical, but they tend to be completely unorganized, socially and politically. Infrastructure and especially transportation infrastructure seems like one of the places where the people who use a service most are also those who have the least control over it.
[1]Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History 27.