The Explorer: Into The City
By: Betsy Bonilla
The world around us is rapidly
changing, we noticed it by the new clothes we wear, the new cars we drive, how
we now communicate with each other. We see it with our everyday changing
lifestyles and even where it is that we actually live. What we have and how we
have it is not always noticeable but it has ultimately pulled us away from rural areas into urban ones. We see it depicted in the media all the time; on the news, the Internet and
every day on the TV. Even children's TV shows have to be changed to go along
with our "evolving" way of life.
Consider Dora the Explorer:
 |
| Before |
The
little Hispanic girl that has a talking backpack, map, a furry purple monkey
for a best friend and many other talking animals that she takes on adventures
through the wilderness- over the mountains though the woods type of stuff- mean
while "trying" to teach kids Spanish. Well, after about 10 years or
so, someone decided that it was time for Dora to grow up and to move on to
better and bigger things...the city! Here she replaces all of her fuzzy furry
friends (never to be seen again including her best friend ‘boots’) with kids just like her (Kind of. Oh and Diego is now Pablo, I think.), adds some 'bing bing' (fancy charm bracelet and some diamond earrings), new cloths
and throws away that magical paper map for an APP MAP on her fancy new cell
phone. Unfortunately this is what the future generation is getting exposed to
on a daily bases (and apparently loving Aunts in college). This unrealistic, materialistic view is what seems to be what
makes the world go around.
 |
| After |
As
they mentioned on the documentary: Requiem for Detroit, about the once
great, successful, powerful, rapidly growing city, "ability to move on, meant
the chance to move up". With the high demands of a faster and more
reliable means of transportation that is exactly what Detroit once did, it move
up and fast. With Ford moving from the farm, to the city pavement the car
industry, in Detroit, added fuel to the growing desire for individuality and
superiority. In an urban place where you now have to sell your labor for an
hourly wage, at first having a car meant that you needed one and once everyone
was able to afford one it became about who had the best one, the newest one. For
sometime this was great for the rapidly growing city which brought in new
people and new jobs. However, that was also it’s down fall and possibly all of
ours. As soon as more competition and the need for smaller more efficient vehicles
became present was when Detroit began to stand still. Most of the city left
behind in ruins with only the poor left behind to climb out of the rubble. With
the wonderful evil capitalism digging its claws deeper into humanity it continued
and continues to separate the poor from the wealthy. It is just doing it on a different
landscape.
Just
think that in about 20 years or so 60 percent of the world's population will live
in urban areas, some growing a lot faster than others. Granted that what
someone might consider to be an "urban area" is completely different
then what others might consider it to be. So we can't just look at the size or
the population of the city or town, we also have to look at its location, its
laws, its infrastructure or the lack there of, even how people interact with
each other; the community. As I am writing this it has become harder and harder
to distinguish what is the city and what is not. Some cities like Chicago have
started to expand outward covering more land, blurring the boundaries of what is
urban and what is not. Other places like Greenland consider places with 200 inhabitants to be urban and are growing a much smaller pace, but still growing.
So
it is very important to look at all the different ways in which an urban
community is made up of and to look at the past and present of what works or does
not work. As Neil
Blackshaw mentions in his article, “Whose city is it anyway? The harsh
truth about urbanisation,” there are two ways to look at a city: as “...the key
to economic growth and increased prosperity...” or “as being chaotic, and a
focus of poverty and violence”. Unfortunately most, if not all, of the time it
is only the wealthy that truly get to prosper from such type of environment and
the poor are pushed to one side left to suffer. People who lack resources cannot
leave the urban lifestyle to “better pastures” even if they wanted too and they
cannot afford to live comfortably within the social spaces of the city. Sometimes
growth is good, everyone seems to gain for a little while but when things grow
too fast, and in a sense out of control, it becomes extremely, if not impossible,
to sustain itself. This is why we have to study and learn about urbanization and urbanism, the actual structure and its culture, respectively according to Gottdiener. It
is our future and let’s face it, the ‘one percent’ is not going to grow but the
poor sure is.
Work Cited
Gottdiener, M., Ryan, M. T., & Hutchison, R.
(2015). The New Urban Sociology (Fifth Edition ed.). Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
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