- Sep 2016
-
www.yalelawjournal.org www.yalelawjournal.org
-
Moses used his power as an architect to make it physically difficult for certain individuals to reach the places from which he desired to exclude them.
If the hill is steep enough, it might as well be a wall.
-
Exclusion through architecture should be subject to scrutiny that is equal to that afforded to other methods of exclusion by law.
This is difficult however, because you cannot always prove intent. It will boil down to one's words against another. This is why it is so hard to combat those in power, because the effects of their actions can be broad and varied. It's hard to say whether there was malicious intent.
-
She further suggests that the racial meaning of a place can allow those in charge, such as police officers, to determine who belongs in that place and who does not.
Norms can be just as powerful as laws when persecuting an indivuals
-
However, people tend to believe that the plan and structures of cities are created for purposes of efficiency or with the goal of furthering the general public interest, and they overlook the ways that design can exclude.
Efficiency for whom? Certainly not for the lower class or the general public.
-
Although legal scholars do not often write directly about architecture as regulation, some—especially law and geography scholars and critical race theorists—have confronted concepts like architecture, the built environment, municipal infrastructure, space, and place in the context of class and race.
This is frustrating because I don't understand how hard it is to see how a bridge or a sidewalk can connect people and how a lack of one might can divide, it might as well be a wall.
-
It is regulation. Consequently, it makes even more sense to apply the concept of regulation through architecture to the built environment than it does to apply it to the Internet or structuring decisions.
This reminds of the net neutrality controversy, allowing internet providers to charge a fee to let visitors of said websites to have faster speeds when visiting their sites. By doing this internet providers can control where people go on the internet, by controlling connivence and speed. This can be used to serve the agendas of these providers, and undermine smaller sites and business.
-
“regulation intended to influence acts by shaping, structuring, or reconfiguring the practical conditions or preconditions of acts.”
Probability is power. Exclusion does not need to be expressed as overtly as a bridge too low for the passing of buses to divide people. If you can control whats likely to happen, then what's the difference between in directly controlling what happens. Why the latter doesn't occur is because outrage would occur ensue.
-
Nicholas Blomley terms this “traffic logic”: the idea that planners and civil engineers prioritize the flow of pedestrians and traffic through a physical space, with a focus on civil engineering, rather than prioritizing equal access to a physical space for all, with a focus on civil rights
This is a major theme I see in our western capitalist country, efficiency over equality. It may not be particular to capitalist nations, but I feel it is very apparent.
-
At the most general level, it is not controversial among planning and geography scholars to assert that the built environment often is constructed in a way that furthers political goals.
Seeing that there is a general consensus among scholars of the effects architecture can have on our social behavior with one another and that it is still not recognized among lawmakers shows me that this is a willful ignorance used to serve personal agendas.
-
However, the built environment does serve to regulate human behavior and is an important form of extra-legal regulation.
Though it is not a spoken division people, it is a physical one that controls people's behavior through connivence.
-
- Aug 2016
-
www.yalelawjournal.org www.yalelawjournal.org
-
First, potential challengers, courts, and lawmakers often fail to recognize architecture as a form of regulation at all, viewing it instead as functional, innocuous, and prepolitical.
Would these challengers, courts, and lawmakers have any motives to not acknowledge architecture as regulation?
-