by hand

“But then what happened, when the dream came true? He gets the house in the country, gets the fucking pool table, the television set, got all the things. The kid next door, he has all the other things, all the same things, and suddenly they’re all by themselves.”
(Ralph Fasanella[1])

Urbanists, globally, anticipated the “control freakery” of New Labour by a good half-century (Sennett, 2006). Twentieth-century urbanism took the anti-urban slogan of spatially separated uses as a starting point, and governments used it to reconstruct their cities, surrounds and sub-urbs as places to live (Salingaros, 2010b:46). Functionalism[2] begat physiological based design criteria, orphaning the psychological and social aspect. Transportation corridors (roads, paths, trains) replaced public space, destroyed communities, and placed enormous burdens on families (Jacobs, 2004:34), eventually creating outdoor environments threatening unless under vehicular protection (Salingaros, 2010b:44). Now people flee to the city to fill their gas tanks in safety, out of the range of sniper fire (Ross, 2004 discussing the 2002 suburban sniper incident in Washington D.C.). Expansive green spaces intended as foci for increased social activity in reality encouraged the opposite (Gehl, 1987; Sennett, 2006) and glimpses of green from speeding cars ended up being judged as sufficient contact with nature (Salingaros, 2010b:44). Separation of residential, industrial, commercial and public areas and buildings drove the migration of once public activities into private space (Gehl, 1987; Sieverts, 1986) leaving the public as defensible enclaves with selective access; separation in lieu of the negotiation of life in the common, rounding up of the criminal residual difference (Bauman, 2000:94). Now even the memory of the loss of secure homes (unlocked doors, open stoops, eating wine gums in your underwear in the sun) in both suburbs or cities is lost (Jacobs, 2005:23) unless you can afford a place in a ‘community’[3] of surveillance, hired guns, punishment and ejection, instead of safety earned through eyes, tongues and hands (Bauman, 2000:92-3).

Depthless[4], the homogeneity[5], fragmentation and hierarchy of modernity resulted in metropoli of COARSE, ENTERPRISE GRAINED crumbs (Lefebvre, quoted in Kitayama, 2010b:19 re: crumbs; Turner and Roberts, 1975:133 re: coarse grain, Berardi, 2009b) and ghost suburbs, where it is possible to drive for miles and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space (Jacobs, 2004:36). We have produced an easy to administer but dehumanizing living environment for most[6] – defined in the pathologies of the individual and addressed in the form of payments to property owners (e.g. Salingaros et al., 2010) – where access to good housing is created on the basis of mathematical models of risk in which peoples’ lives mean absolutely nothing, where the poor are ‘played’ against the less poor (co-opting the have-nots), and the social right to housing is artificially subordinated to the private right to realize a profit[7] (Marazzi, 2010:41) . Finally, prisons emerge as the fastest growing type of American household (Jacobs, 2004:43) and mobile homes account for 30% of all new single-family dwellings sold nationwide (Ross, 2004)[8].

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[1] quoted in Watson, 1973:44

[2] The “blackmail of utility” (Vaneigem and Kotányi, 1961), the “universal law” (Ellul, 1978:177).

[3] That which now stands for whatever is left of the dreams of a better life shared with better neighbours all following better rules of cohabitation – a utopia of harmony slimmed down to the immediate neighbourhood (Bauman, 2000:92). Community = the market + isolation; Freedom = total surveillance society (Zerzan, 2006).

[4] Zerzan (2008a).

[5] Homogeneity in the Japanese suburb (‘bed town’ or ‘new town’) has a meaning in and of itself. The standardization of suburban family in postwar Japanese society came hand in hand with other baggage – the complete absence of a working father dedicated to his company, and the complete maternal absorption of an educational system that relied heavily on test scores. These phenomena, in turn, helped to feed the increasing homogeneity of the suburb. Ultimately, the suburb’s physical homogeneity and visionless development (Kira and Terada, 2000) became linked to the repression of human individuality (Terada, 2000b:83).

[6] Witnessing the areas in which suburbia is encroaching into the rice fields in Japan is like awakening from a beautiful dream to a nightmare in which a sea of prefabricated houses screams the promise of a happy life. The abrupt intrusion of the ultracontemporary into the most nostalgic landscapes in Japan is emblematic of its radical transformation (Kira, 2000b:13-4).

[7] Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt (Deleuze, 1992:6).

[8] Prisoners and the homeless being the two fastest growing classes (Zerzan, 2008b:99)