The city is full of boundaries. Messages about the space we are inhabiting,
telling us where we are allowed to stay put, and where we should keep
moving; where we can and can’t enter,
and under what conditions; messages
about how we should behave once inside.
Sometimes these signals are obvious – a fence with a locked
gate tells us we are not meant to enter somewhere. Some signals are more subtle – a change in
the texture of the paving tells us that we are moving from public space to
private property, where our legal rights are very different, dictated by the
landowner instead of a democratically accountable council or government. These messages are sent out by urban
infrastructure like radio waves, and continually reinforced in our minds by the
behaviours of those we see around us.
And they are indeed messages: not accidents of construction, but
actions carefully considered by town
planners, architects, corporations, local authorities, etc.
We now rely on a complex web of signals and signposts to
guide our interactions with the city, and with each other. Road markings, traffic signs, positioning of
kerbs and speed humps, bollards, railings, fences, walls, the design of junctions and roundabouts, phasing
of traffic lights; anti-skateboarding
devices, anti-pigeon devices, anti-youth devices that emit a high-pitched
noise, benches designed to repel homeless people; anti-climb paint; positioning and availability of facilities
such as street lamps, public toilets;
the design of buses and bus stops, and the layout of their routes. There is even an example of a town in Essex
that painted yellow lines on the pavement to guide where people should walk.
These layers of mediation between our inner thoughts and our
external environment have the cumulative effect over time that we stop making
decisions and relating our judgements to our direct experiences of the place
and our memories. Instead, we check the
signals. Or rather, we don’t stop thinking altogether – but our
thoughts maybe lack nuance, and our ability to critically interpret and respond
to new situations is diminished.
Our diminished ability to think critically about situations
leads to our becoming isolated from other people in our immediate surroundings. People stop being individuals, and become specimens
of a given category. When we drive along
the road, we’re looking out for drivers in front and behind us, checking to see
if they’re indicating, whether they’re speeding up or slowing down, performing
pre-determined movements that imply particular patterns of behaviour. We’re not thinking about what that person is
like; what sort of day they’re
having; how they’re feeling; etc.
And fair enough – if we spent all our time wondering what
the driver next to us was going to have for dinner, I’m not sure it would help
our driving. But I still think it’s
important to note the trade-off that we make in this process of dehumanisation.
Our removal from other road-users is all the more stark in
relation to people in different categories.
People on the ‘other’ side of the boundaries that mark up the city. For example, if we travel along the road in a
car, we are not only bodily separated from the outside world through the
physical fact of the car’s shell. We
also a gulf apart from pedestrians inhabiting the parallel dimension of the
pavement.
The visual language of the division between the road and the
pavement is powerful enough that we are able to drive along and see people on
the pavement in a completely different category to those driving the car
directly in front of us.
We’re aware of those pedestrians in our peripheral vision,
but as long as their body-language doesn’t indicate they’re about to make a mad
dash into the road (into our world, colliding with our reality), we are able to
ignore them.
This isn’t an argument that we should abolish kerbs, and
there are many good and helpful reasons that symbolic and physical signs and
barriers – though there have been some
interesting experiments in removing these.
But I do think it’s interesting to interrogate the effects of
excessively taxonomised mindsets on the relationships between different users
of urban space.
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