Futher design adventures in public peeing

Courtesy of my mother, advances in the urinalization of city streets: a Swiss designer brings the hybrid urinal-wheelie bin to London.

Dwelling

Michael Wolf's 100x100 did the blog/fb rounds a few weeks ago now, coinciding with a story in the NYT about a fire that killed three people living in illegal apartments in Queens. Wolf's subjects live in purpose-built 100 foot square units in a public housing development in Hong Kong. The three men who died in Queens were trapped in a basement that had been illegally divided into four one room units with only one exit. Wolf's photographs testify to the resourcefulness of their subjects, to what makes a home, how you make a home, and the complex domestic interplay of concrete architectural limits and personal needs, desires, and resources. These photographic subjects are subject to their material space, and subjects who shape that space. There is no equivalent visual record of the intra-active relationship the three Queens men had with their dwellings.

Without meaning to conflate cultural difference, or get too entangled in relative concepts of poverty, it seems that neither set of living spaces would appear to meet the standard of being affordable, safe housing, with adequate utilities, that doesn't exploit or punish those on low incomes, and jeopardize their health. Whilst the Hong Kong apartments are planned public housing, and the Queens apartments are the illegal improvisation of private entrepreneurs, both respond to the problem (market?) of high density low income populations by cramming rent payers into windowless single room dwellings. The Queens landlords are modifying existing structures, but (I assume) the (presumably British) administration in Hong Kong started with a blanker slate, and still ended up in the same conceptual place.

It's reassuring that local Dane County conservatives are concerned with such problems, pointing out that, "The Soviet Union and in East Berlin and all those places. They built these...very ugly high-rise apartments, and they jammed people into these." Just a shame that they think this housing dystopia will be the inevitable outcome of introducing commuter rail to Madison. Anyone have a better solution for urban housing inadequacy than telling the proles to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and buy a car and a ranch house?

One word for you: plastics

Actually, plastics aren't the reason this WaPo article, and the research it reports, is irritating, in all too familiar ways. It's the aggravating assumptions signaled in the opening sentence: "Elevated levels of two plastic-softening chemicals in pregnant women's urine are linked to less-masculine play behavior by their sons several years later, according to a study published last week." A sense of what "less-masculine" means in this context emerges in the researchers' methodology: "A team of U.S. and British researchers posed a standard play questionnaire to the parents of 145 preschool-age children. Then they ranked the types of play on a scale from most masculine (such as play fighting or using trucks) to most feminine." Gendered behavior is unreflexively essentialized, and perceived gender deviance is posited as a physical medical problem (pollutants are emasculating our boy children - they're not fighting as much as they should! The horror!).

There's a message here about women's exposure to the toxicity of everyday life, but it's framed in terms of their bodies' reproductive responsibility for gender normative children. In the oblivious scientific bubble that this news snippet renders, gender is stable, self-evident, and resolutely binary. And maintaining the masculinity of male children is articulated as a primary justification for concern over women's exposure to toxic materials (materials that are framed as toxic here precisely because they interfere with normative gender development). Yawn and snarl and did decades of feminist critique really not happen? Sandra Harding asked in The Science Question in Feminism in 1986, "Will not the selection and definition of problems always bear the social fingerprints of the dominant groups in a culture?" and "Is it possible to isolate a value-neutral core from the uses of science and its technologies?" Evelyn Fox Keller noted in 1987 that "gender has been, and remains, constitutively operative in science." Way to respond to those crazy new insights.

"Ruin porn"

A lost and now rediscovered link. Vice magazine reassures me in my concern about the rabid photographic fascination with Detroit - "If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house." Awesome writing: "I pulled up at one of East Detroit’s community farms and tried to talk to a couple kids who were either loading or unloading some boxes of stuff. After staring at the mic clipped to my shirt like it was a severed baby’s clit, one of the main guys (I think) explained their position."

PostNatural Organism of the Month

Courtesy of the Center for PostNatural History. As also admired some time ago at Pruned.

Anti-public space

I'd been following snippets in The Isthmus concerning Madison's re-engineering of benches around the Capitol to prevent their "misuse." So it was interesting to discover that that other city of my higher education, Oxford, is similarly seeking to dissuade what is deemed inappropriate use of public seating. At least Madison's public seating is still actually functional as seating, rather than being a ridiculously expensive slab of something to lean against. But both cities seem invested in catering only to the needs of a certain public, and to be disciplinarily intent on policing the bodily comportment of that (sober, housed, able-bodied, sane, en-route-to-some-appropriately-contained-other-place) public. The benches in question are aesthetic props in the staging of a welcoming and pleasant urban center that deliberately excludes bodies that contradict its prosperous self-image, and that serve no profitable purpose. (Though it's amusing that the image in the link shows the democratic repurposing of the Oxford "benches" for the radical act of actually sitting down on a public street.)

In this regard, both Oxford and Madison contribute to what Barbara Ehrenreich has called the "criminalization of poverty." As she noted in the NYT in August, "You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering."

So much...

internet joyousness, so little time. Can't believe I haven't discovered Urban Sketchers before now, but happy to have the archives to peruse.

Northern England...

is indeed a different place. Nothing new in this piece on the architecture of the West Riding, but a weirdly comforting remembrance of places I'm familiar with, if not native to.

Long overdue apology

Turing "deserved so much better."

No. Just no.

Surely the solution to men using the world as a public urinal isn't to attach public urinals to the world?