Tag Archives: built environment

Passage Responses: Schindler’s “Architectural Exclusion”

1. Urban Design is exactly what it sounds like: the layout and architectural from the lines on the street to the top of the skyscrapers in an Urban, city-like location. Visually, Urban Design can look like what a Georgia State student sees when they walk to and fro from the numerous and fluctuating in architectural stylistics buildings that Georgia State owns. We at GSU are surrounded and immersed in Urban Design.

4. A lot of times people barely recognize the implications behind architecture or urban design, much less are cognizant of the exclusionary nature behind it. Something as simple as a park bench with bars separating 3 seats could be viewed as such (more than likely by people who live in the community or are privileged). However, for a homeless person, those bars, bar them from being able to sleep on the benches.

7. Architecture designs are all created with purpose. The phrase “there are no neutral designs” is in concurrence with that. All architecture has rhetoric, it simply communicates to different people different things- especially within different socioeconomic statuses.

14. It is very common to see African Americans (or POC in general)  living in urban or metropolitan communities and Caucasians residing in suburban areas because of the stratification in cost of living. This fact, and the fact that many minorities living in the inner city either cannot afford or have no need to possess private transit such as a car. Therefore public transit is very common and heavily used. Although minorities have access to transit suburban towns have blocked this transit from reaching their towns- keeping minorities and their ability to get jobs in the inner city.

Actually An Annotation: Implications of Life in an Urban Setting.

Katz, Peter, Vincent Joseph Scully, and Todd W. Bressi. The new urbanism: Toward an architecture of community. Vol. 10. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

 

Peter Katz works as a design and marketing consultant in California, San Francisco and Seattle, Washington. Katz studied architecture and graphic design at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, Vincent Joesph Scully is Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University and Todd W. Bressi is the leader of deisgn journal places and teaches Art in Architecture at the Penn and Pratt Institute. In their book The New Urbanism: Toward An Architecture of Community the esteemed authors write on the topic of New Urbanism: “A movement that seeks to put the basic amenities for communal living back into urban settings that otherwise lack said amenities like adequate transit, parks and recreational program, and others to allow for a comfortable home life in or on the outskirts of a major city” (Bressi, Katz, Scully). In this book the authors relied mostly on primary research such as collected statistical information, and data on the quality of life in inner cities developed by the three authors in their respective fields. The purpose of this book is to highlight the implications of having living communities within or just outside of a city and what that means for inhabitants in regards to having the amenities needed for living comfortably and to reveal the architectural solutions to this lack of amenities for urban living communities. The intended audience for this book are students and researchers looking to understand how architecture and other amenities effect quality of life within urban settings. This book is useful because it lays out a prospective plan to make living more comfortable for those within or on the outskirts of an urban setting.

Some Summarizing Stuff: Architectural Exclusion

The Architectural Exclusion piece by Sarah Schindler: Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment was not only deeply insightful and thought provoking, but also maddening. In this piece Schindler breaks down exactly what architectural exclusion is and how architecture is used to alter the behavior and abilities of the people within or surrounded by said architecture, and even how it is purposely constructed to exclude.

Schindler describes architectural exclusion as “a man made built environment with specific features that make it difficult for certain individuals- usually poor people and people of color- to access certain places”. Some of these exclusionary architectural pieces are obvious, such as walls or gates, others such as bus stops and traffic signs are more insidious in their purpose of denying unwanted people into suburbia or other places of higher socioeconomic status. Lawmakers and civil activists have catalyzed progressive change in acts of exclusion towards minorities or those living in poverty such as rezoning, however when it comes to architectural exclusion many things such as lack of streets signs to allow for people who are unfamiliar with the area (people of lower socioeconomic status who couldn’t afford to live there) to be able to get around efficiently, thus discouraging people who don’t live in the neighborhood to travel in that area.

Another example of architectural exclusion given by the author is the placement of bus and train stops. It doesn’t usually come to the attention of the minds of people who don’t use public transportation, however to those who utilize public transportation, they are affected directly by the decision made by suburban predominantly white areas to blocked transportation stops from their areas. This keeps out undesirable people from living, visiting and working in their areas. This form of exclusion not only acts to keep people of lower socioeconomic out, but also inhibits them from acquiring higher paying jobs if not jobs at all. Schindler provides an example of how this form of built environment has even proved to be dangerous for those trying to escape the confines of the environment they live in. Cynthia Wiggins, a 17-year-old girl African American girl had to walk across a 7 lane highway to walk to work, and got struck and died. She was on her way to work at Walden Galleria, a suburban upscale mall. She was forced to cross the highway every time on her way to work because her bus route did not cross Walden Avenue, a street that split two cities. Transit stops also prevent those in a lower socioeconomic place from getting jobs in that they can’t get to the jobs. However money isn’t the problem. Some areas with higher socioeconomic stature will readily raise the minimum wage to encourage older people and teenagers already living in the area to work. Further proving the blocking of transit is really to architecturally exclude.

This article really shocked me in that our society has even more insidious ways of enforcing institutionalized racism and peniaphobia. Schindlers piece on architectural exclusion breaks down the many ways that we do that, and reveals how subconscious America’s exclusion of those who are not of a certain culture or socioeconomic stature really is.
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/architectural-exclusion