The world in which we live today is
absolutely becoming defined by it large predominance in cities and urban
living. The majority of the world’s population lives in cities. These urban
environments have become the pinnacle, and possibly face, of life in modern
days. While there are many determinants of what exactly makes up a city, one
thing that is certainly pivotal in any city’s identification is its
socio-spacial perspective from city to city. I found this thought of space to
particularly interesting as it seems to cover many if not all bases in the
attempt to give a deep understanding of city life in terms of its reasoning for
constructed as it is, its concrete and abstract uses for the people living in
the city, and how space may affect the ways in which different individuals live
life.
The
first way to consider space within a city as being important is to ponder it
from urban origins. Cities were formed in ways that were central to their
cultures at the time, and are actually ever changing in the perception of their
space. Older civilizations from centuries ago developed cities as ways to
glorify gods, structures, or current royalty. Cities were structured to where
they would funnel all infrastructures in towards their capitals and the more
prominent portions of the city. Today the makeup of a city is significantly
different, and could be changing ever more rapidly. Looking at Chicago for
instance, its structure has always been more for the sake of industry, a key
facet of our world today. With industry being such a powerhouse driving the
city, the focal points of cities in terms of their space have always been
geared towards what is industrial, and furthermore capitalist, to think even more
relatively to today. Chicago, considering the entirety of history all together,
has not been around long but has, in its short lifespan already managed to
shift what within its space are landmarks of importance or high significance
within the city, shaping the interactions all around those central points.
Along
with this the idea of space is the separation between use of physical space for
sake of necessity as well as use of physical space for sake of culture. Another
way that this was examined was through the lens of separation between urbanization
and urbanism. Urbanization can be a lot of different things. It was the initial
flock of people towards cities when industry first emerged. It was a turning
point for the change in economics from a feudal system into a capitalist
society. And for the sake of examination of urbanization now that urban living
has become such a large part of the way the world functions entirely, urbanization
can now be viewed as all previous things in conjunction with convenience of
living. Office buildings are built frivolously to increase productivity and
output of goods and services, restaurants and parks are made for the use of
people, and roads and otherwise are made to get to it all. Urbanism is a
simpler concept, but a far less defined one; that concept being culture and the
ways that people go about life in the city, what it means to live in the city,
and ultimately how the environment and the individual conduct a dialogue, which
I find to be an utterly fascinating aspect of the city.
As space and the layout of urban
communities progress or change, so have the actual communities and socioeconomic
groups themselves. This accounts for a different kind of space that is
established after a city is physically and culturally constructed. The kind of
space that I am talking about is mobility; the hope to achieve more by people
living in urban environments. However,
with urban areas being brought out by a rise in industry and the capitalist
economic system, this idea of space in terms of mobility may be dwindling
generations into urban constructions. According to teachings from Marx, people
were initially viewed by industrial entrepreneurs as simply means to their ends
of acquiring wealth through the workers’ labor (the proletariat). At first,
this idea of capitalizing on the labor of people was what kept cities filled
with workers, but growing evermore quickly, the industries themselves, and the
growth of urbanization. From the dawning of industrialization across the world,
businesses who had originally been exploiting their workers for cheap labor,
are now doing still doing so but for less expense or they are picking up their
labor stationing in cities and outsourcing work to cheaper means of production.
With this occurrence, people in urban living are experiencing a divide between
those with more upward mobility and those with a complete restriction of such
actualization. My reaction to this, both in viewing Requiem for Detroit and reading the class text, I see the space
that people are given to do more as becoming lesser and lesser, and all the
while, physical alterations to cities are done almost in an attempt to
quarantine the less desirable or less affluent, a complete 180 degree shift
from what I see as being the reason for city formation in the first place; for
people to gather in a centralized location in order to conduct business where
anyone could potentially make a name or life for themselves. Such an idea is
falling by the way side and space is being lost.
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