For my transect walk, I decided to walk around East Bayside\/Munjoy Hill and look at the kinds of educational infrastructure in place around the neighborhoods. Before leaving on my walk, I made sure to look on Google Maps and see where there were schools, as I wanted to check areas around schools to see what I could find in terms of playgrounds and playspace for children and what I noticed about where children were playing. These were my findings:<\/p>\n
Many locations where I anticipated seeing some kind of school were just residential. It seems like the schools were converted into housing recently. On Google Maps, there were at least 3 schools with addresses that I passed that just did not exist.<\/p>\n
I was greatly under-impressed with the amount of playgrounds and easily accessible playspaces for students after school. I saw no students walking outside, though this might have been I took my transect walk on a rainy day. I was not able to get to Portland in time for school dismissal, which I believe is much earlier than our general end of classes, but overall there were almost no public playgrounds that were accessible to kids. Even the playspaces on Eastern Prom are hard for students to access, as to get to the playgrounds, kids need to cross large streets with fast moving cars (and their parents may not let them do this by themselves).<\/p>\n
As for the neighborhoods of Munjoy Hill and East Bayside, they are definitely more \u201cgritty\u201d neighborhoods as Sharon Zukin would say in \u201cHow Brooklyn Became Cool.\u201d{1} It is hard to tell which areas are impoverished, as all the buildings are built in a similar New England brownstone-equivalent style, but some are less well-kept than others. Because of the weather, there were very few people out on the streets. It was not an uncomfortable experience to walk around, but I felt like it was not what I saw that was impressive in relation to school and playground infrastructure, but what I did not see. There is an incredible lack of playgrounds and open playspace for students in the Munjoy Hill\/East Bayside area. The only relatively young people I saw seemed to be about late high school\/college age and were smoking in front of a house in East Bayside.<\/p>\n
I originally was looking more into transportation in Portland, but decided that I thought infrastructure as it relates to education would be more interesting. I think that from what I saw in Munjoy Hill and East Bayside, Portland definitely needs to improve on its education infrastructure. While I do not know what educational infrastructure exists in other neighborhoods of Portland, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of playgrounds and playspace for students. When I did my caf\u00e9 ethnography, I was surrounded in the caf\u00e9 by parents and their young children. To see such a vibrant community of young parents and their children was very exciting to me, but educational infrastructure in the city should be improved to support those children\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n
{1} Zukin, Sharon. “How Brooklyn Became Cool.” In\u00a0Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 35-62.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For my transect walk, I decided to walk around East Bayside\/Munjoy Hill and look at the kinds of educational infrastructure in place around the neighborhoods. Before leaving on my walk, I made sure to look on Google Maps and see where there were schools, as I wanted to check areas around schools to see what … Continue reading Where are the playgrounds?<\/span>