Apart Together
the following is an excerpt from Gerald E. Frug's City Making, that am reading now for my housing class that i found immensely interesting and resonates with my preoccupation with an ideal of city life based on accepted and celebrated dissonance. its similar to the iris marion young's article about city and community life, both in essence suggesting that the problem of why we find ourselves so divided (in cities, but could this apply to life as well?) is that we try to imagine ourselves as so connected and supposedly sharing a common vision, but to the detriment that we deny, indeed repress, and are supposedly ashamed of our differences.
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"in my view, making togetherness the only alternative to separation has set the standard for relationships with others too high. togetherness eliminates strangeness from strangers by reuqiring them to fit into a "we" feeling that nanishes dissonance or discomfort. such a standard is so hard to achieve that it tends to produce more separation than connection. for those who have perceived themsleves as outside of the "we" feeling, the demands of togetherness have required assimilation to norms - white norms, or suburban norms, or upper-middle-class norms (and my words... i would add even counter culture itself ultimately becomes normailizing... i.e. gay cultural "norms") - with which they disagreed. and for those who have learned to identify with these norms, it has closed off the enrichment, and the challenge, of dealing with otherness. above all, the demand for togetherness has suppressed the posibility that one might not feel comfortable with someone yet still be able to deal with him.....like Jane Jacob's description of a city street, city life is a compromise between withdrawal from strangers and engagement with them. the exact nature of this compromise constantly has to be negotiated and renegotiated. it is this process of negotiation that represents the charateristic city alternative to teh idea that the proper solution to one's problems or to the problems of society is to escape from them."
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and while i'm still on this tangent, and excerpt from the portfolio description of my thesis project, and aids memorial in the west village of new york city that on one hand dealt with this issue of "city life".
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"as the pier structures had morpher throughout the years of existence and become continually re-signified, from industry, to sub-cultural fringe, to now reclaimed "normalacy", teh memorial as a pier "typology" attempts to extend this continual re-masking of site against the push of the civic vision for a continual smooth green carpet of normalizing stitiching, that is the hudson river park project. this memorial to aids, located in the heart of an often silenced sub-cultural "anti-norm" community... so viscerally devastated by the disease... is in essence an "anti-stitch", it seeks to disrupt the image of smooth continual normalacy. its charge is to not allow you to escape the city, to not allow you to escape the memory of aids. instead it is about recognizing the city as a bricollage of potentially transformative meanings... and it is about recognizing, transforming, and rescripting the concept of "remembering" aids. the memorial is an activating device that generates performances... urban performances that happen everyday but are forgotten and overlooked amongst left over "disused" spaces. the memorial is left over space, but one so intentionally blank that it beckons to be given meaning, and to be re-given meaning time and time again. it is a device that attempts to realize that disease, that history, that culture, and the city is continually being created, destroyed, transformed... and it is exactly that vitality of change that is ultimately the spirit of true democracy for the metropolis. it reminds you that "memorial" in the end is not about "a" memory of an experience... it must be an experience of memory. consequently, the democratic city is not about a solitary image of urban existence, but it is about experiencing the rich, tumultous contention of multiple existences, each battling for its own space of signification."
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posted by faux chink @ 12:52 PM
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