"The experience of space and time" really spoke to me, as our telecommunications has reached near instantaneous levels - messages to the Falkland Islands can be sent in fractions of a second, videos from Thailand can be sent and received in equal amounts of time. As our world creates connections and comes to a common purpose, our sense of space and time has dramatically compressed, to use the term from the text. Packages can be sent to every corner of this planet, resources in every corner of country are potentially accessible to corporations given the correct amount of palm greasing and infrastructural developments. I was contemplating this reality as I was observing the local port - ships passing from Hamburg, Panama, the US, Turkey, Morocco, the list goes on - with goods from every corner of the planet. I contemplated this as I passed the Chinese consulate of Odessa, and I began to think about how every item I have on, everything I eat, my entertainment, all comes from "somewhere else", we are reaching levels of international cooperation hitherto unheard of.
The section on the homogeneity of space, that space belongs in the hands of the bourgeois, referred to as "pulverization" reminded me of what I am seeing on the West coast. Gentrification has become a huge problem in Washington, old buildings, ethnic neighborhoods, and working class towns and suburbs are being bought up, the price is driven up for everyone else pricing the original inhabitants out of the community, and replacing all of the old architecture that actually had some character with soulless glass boxes and whole food stores. Homeless people have no place in this new packaged and consumer world. The upper middle class and politicians fail to see how these same policies that are pricing young families and working communities out of the marketplace are driving up crime, drug abuse and homelessness, after all who can afford a 1200 USD a month rent making 12 dollars an hour? The common space, and support systems of the civic sector are not flourishing in this day and age - areas where we are all free to explore and inhabit are rapidly decreasing, and the space continues compressing further and further. I can't envision a world that is even further centralized, but I am certain this will continue to develop in ways we can't even imagine, and the bourgeois will continue the transfer of capital from the middle and working class upwards, real estate and commodities brought in from half a world away are mere vehicles of this change.
Excellent description of the new time-space compression we are currently living through, Dylan. These are the kinds of sentences we need to begin articulating in order to understand the processes and the links between scales that are all around us in a dramatically new way. Your poetic connections here remind me to remind you to feel free to include a snapshot from your surroundings to demonstrate the things you are writing about. This goes for everyone--let's include that visual evidence in our posts. Through the lens of our readings, photographs become valuable pieces of evidence at times and allow us to think differently about what we are seeing. Sometimes when you are walking around or driving around or non the bus, a scene will strike you unexpectedly and for no clear reason.
ReplyDeleteGiven all of the international connections you are making, it allows us to see the remarkable and perhaps imaginative accomplishment of current dominant ideologies that want us to understand the landscape as homogenous, unified, and without struggle. So you point to a very valuable contemporary contradiction: how is it possible that the historical moment on vast interdependence across the globe is simultaneously the historical moment of the most dramatic effort toward complete homogenization of the cities on the planet? Where are the spaces for those outside the vision of the dominant culture? What work is being done to contain and erase them. These contradictions are valuable ways into not only a critique but the articulation of new modes of production. Continue to focus on the details of urban space that embody these contradictions. Great work here.