- Feb 2017
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www.yalelawjournal.org www.yalelawjournal.org
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Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment
This article takes time to introduce ideas of discrimination found through built environments. it breaks up into sections and goes through a list of different ways this can happen and different places it can be seen without day to day civilians even blinking an eye at it. Schindler defines these ideas as an ongoing problem, relevant before the people doing it even knew what they were doing. Since American culture hasn't always been as united as it is, we see architecture rejecting certain groups as far back as anyone can remember, even if there intentions through built environments weren't as direct at that time. Reading the opened my eyes to every one way street, neighborhoods lacking connecting sidewalks, and even bus stations that fail to construct in certain areas. Every form of environment around us depicts an understanding of some idea deeper than the building itself, and while sometimes lawmakers, judges, and courts can't always define them as what they are, we as the people now can work to eliminate this discrimination and work to connect it all.
Rosenberger, Robert. "How Cities Use Design to Drive Homeless People Away." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 19 June 2014. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.
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you will not be able to enter the private property unless you have the equipment, skill, and time to circumvent the wall.
Using this idea/ example to examine what the citizens doing the discriminating feel the oppressed groups should have to do before they can enter. Though, in this case, discrimination is stemming from things that can not be altered in a person. There is no "equipment, skills, and time" that these people can offer that the oppressors will feel is enough since the sole "problem" comes from what they can not change
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In addition to making vehicular access difficult, one-way streets such as these are exclusionary in that they can confuse visitors, which might discourage their continued presence in a neighborhood, or make it hard for them to find their way to or from a specific home.179
This might not seem as relevant to many in comparison to the rest of the passage, but I know from my own experience that, especially with one way roads, if they are leading me around the block multiple times and I still fail to know where I going, theres a high chance I won't return unless I have to.
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This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen-year-old woman who was hit and killed by a dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven-lane highway to get to the mall where she worked.141
Examples are used to emphasize that architectural exclusion can do more than its minimal purpose, if its purpose was ever meant to be minimal all. We can never know the full extent of bad intentions incorporated into each built environment, but this one resulted in the death of a young woman.
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The strategy, according to police, was that “buyers would fear ‘driving all over looped streets, stopping and turning around, trying to find drugs with the possibility of having their nice cars, their jewelry, their money ripped off as they look.’”113
If the police were impounding this idea into the people's heads about different ways and things they can do to the streets to, without force, influence the actions of others in a built environment, how can they fail to recognize the same idea on discrimination?
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It examines the laws and norms that led to racial and socioeconomic exclusion from certain parts of a given community, and it surveys judicial and legislative treatment of those traditional forms of legal regulation, including racially restrictive covenants, racial zoning, and exclusionary zoning.
I like this part of the passage because it gives more reason to why we think of architectural exclusion as such an issue today...or really explains why we're able to understand it at all. It does this through explaining the history of built environments from the past and how they have continued over time, in different ways and places, to racially, socially, and economically exclude groups of people from certain places
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Architectural regulation is powerful in part because it is unseen; it “allows government to shape our actions without our perceiving that our experience has been deliberately shaped.”22
I read this quote in a way that leans in the direction of implying ways that the government purposely molds discrimination into a lasting part of our American experience. I don't agree that the government is implicating these features purposely. If anything, they are failing to recognize the built environment intentions and therefor, look over the foundation of where it all begins
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Lessig broadly defined architecture as “the physical world as we find it, even if ‘as we find it’ is simply how it has already been made.”20
But what if we 'find it already made' from the past and it already implies the separation and discrimination of certain groups? In this case, do we change it how we feel it most accepting to all? or do we allow it to continue with its implications?
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although certain forms of exclusion can have beneficial results,1
Who decides whether these results are beneficial or not? While some cases of discrimination are very obvious, others, especially through built environments, can be controversial in how they benefit "each side".
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The most straightforward reason is that it is difficult to show the necessary intent to discriminate, especially in situations involving land use and the built environment.
I can understand how it could be hard to prove intent of discrimination when it comes to landscaping and architecture. While it's very easy to recognize when played out in an article like this, being in a lawmakers position comes with having to look at things from all perspectives
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Wealthy, mostly white residents of the northern Atlanta suburbs have vocally opposed efforts to expand MARTA into their neighborhoods for the reason that doing so would give people of color easy access to suburban communities.7
Being from Gwinnett, I've had first hand experience with these wealthy, white residents in the suburbs and am in no way surprised that they would speak up to object the expansion of MARTA to their own city. They like to make claims that MARTA and even downtown itself can be very unsafe, and can give no reasons for why other than those implying discriminatory ideas.
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This design decision meant that many people of color and poor people, who most often relied on public transportation, lacked access to the lauded public park at Jones Beach.5
This introduces a very specific example and makes me wonder why, of all places, Moses didn't want colored people to have easy access to something as smalls a public park
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atlspaceplacerhets17.robinwharton.net atlspaceplacerhets17.robinwharton.net
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*I.l:lI N V I TAT ION TOVernacular Architecture
'Invitation to Vernacular Architecture' uses a variety of ideas and concepts to explain the full complexity of what exactly is is that this type of architect studies. Carter and Cromley introduce ideas, making them essential, of the study into more than just the physical building, but the stories, culture, time periods, and location as all things that can effect what a building is and why we see it today
Carter, T., & Cromely, E. C. (2005). Invitation to vernacular architecture: a guide to the study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee.
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But even in times of historical recordkeeping, most people do not write about themselves and most do little that makes others want to write about them. But everyone makes, or buys, and uses things,
Puts an emphasis on the importance of building in general, rather on the idea of what the buildings meaning may hold. While the meaning of vernacular architecture is to analyze the buildings in different ways to get the most detailed description possible, its important to remember that at one time, buildings were the only way people knew how to leave their mark.
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And of course if we are looking for “traces of people doing things,” then it is easy to see that one of the main things people did in the past was to build and/or use buildings, and with such objects we do not have to rely on what people said about them.
One way the people that study these buildings are able to draw conclusions is simply through using the progression of the buildings themselves. This quote makes it clear that, in some situations, contact with people from the past or even curiosity about the thoughts that engaged their architectural ideas are unneeded because through the building they can see all they need to know
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- Jan 2017
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atlspaceplacerhets17.robinwharton.net atlspaceplacerhets17.robinwharton.net
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[ethnographic research implies, then, immediate ccmtac t with the behavic >r being studied.11
Ethnographic research is being defined as as a type of research that can't be tainted or influenced from any outside source, since it is being directly observed
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We would not suggest that the study of buildings is some kind of academic panacea. Vernacular architecture research is not going to replac e other kinds of humanistic inquiry. In the right situations, however, it can contribute greatly in addressing many kinds of questions concerning human behavior.
The author explains that the idea of vernacular architecture is not to replace other kinds of studies or even really to compete with them. The purpose of this study is to, like it is said in the quote, contribute greatly in addressing questions on human behavior. By stating this, I feel like the author gave depth to the idea of his study in making it out to be something only intended to help rather than used to compete.
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If you are interested in studying buildings, particularly those of the more ordinary variety that have not been studied before, the place to begin is with the buildings themselves.
Often time people think the best way to learn about something is to dive into research about that subject. This can be done through online data, reading books, talking to specialists, etc. This article explains that for vernacular architecture, the best way to know what you need to know is to go to the building itself and see what you can see. Investigate there.
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Still, no matter how much extrinsic data there is, the evidence obtained by studying the physical object lies at the heart of the research
draws in from points in my last annotation, explaining the importance of the research more so than just the extrinsic data. The research, as stated before, can be explained partially as the experiences the building has undergone or the stories that make it mean something to someone.
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It should he stressed, however, that the field of material culture studies remains artifact-driven, and the investigation and interpretation of buildings and landscapes play leading roles in the research process.
Artifact - driven studies become very objective, giving meaning to the building itself, but lacking the ideas of importance on the history of the building and it's meaning to the culture it was initially originated on. This quotes doesn't fail to mention that interpretation of the building is still essential, but more so in the research process.
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Building separate, detached houses that are spaced far apart in the countryside or separated by just a few feet in urban neighborhoods (fig. 1) would be another way this spirit of individuation is advanced through architecture.
Uses the definition of culture as "consisting of ideas, values, and beliefs stemming from a particular social group", this statement takes culture and personalizes it to a certain individuals trait: valuing private space. By personalizing this concept and making it easier to understand, the author then applies that idea of culture and personal space to architecture, demonstrating how every decision made through architecture is influenced by our own customs, beliefs, and visions.
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The study of vernacular architecture is part of a larger scholarly undertaking known as material culture studies." Material culture m aybe defined, following Deetz, as “that segment of [the human] physical environment which is purposely shaped . . . according to culturally dictated plans.”'
Material culture is based off of purely physical and objective aspects of a certain built environment, but these physical aspects are reflective of the culture that influenced or even physically constructed the environment observed. The culture has a lasting affect on not only the way the building was constructed, but the meaning put behind it for that certain group
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“historic architecture is one aspect of the past that we can still see, touch, experience . . . and part of what attracts us to old buildings is their insistence on communicating, in some outmoded dialect we do not entirely understand, the energy and purpose, the achievements and hopes, the disappointments and hardships of those who made and used them.”1" I
These building are able to communicate through more than the stories or journals told about the events taken place inside, but also in the way they were built and still stand in relation to what we know about other buildings from that time. Can be tied in with "Unpredictable, High Risk, High Cost: Planning for the worst is the worst" by noting that natural disaster and all of the emotions that lie within that disaster can be tied to the progression of housing in a certain area and how it affected the people there
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As you move further back in time, however, and the testimonies or actions of users are missing, a well-trained eye for what was built, used, remodeled, or even torn down may be all you have. R
In "Unpredictable, High Risk, High Cost: Planning for the worst is the worst" it states that Native Americans, African Americans, and ethnic enclaves have centuries of old ties to land, making them the hardest to advocate displacement. This exemplifies this concept of Vernacular Architecture, showing that certain groups of people make ties to a certain area through culture and experience and in that, it becomes who they are and hard to let go or progress from.
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