onetenchelsea

"I look into my crystal globe, and I dream of the carnival of the multicultural city. I don't want a city where everything stays the same and everyone is afraid of change; I don't want a city where young African Americans have to sell drugs to make a living, or Thai women are imprisoned in sweat shops in the garment district where they work 16 hours a day, six days a week; where boys carry guns to make them feel like men, and suspicion oozes from plaster walls, and white neighbourhoods call the police if they see a black/stranger on their street. I don't want a city where the official in charge refuses to deal with the man standing at his desk because everything about him is different; where immigrants are called 'blackheads' and forced to find shelter in the industrial zone; where whites pay more and more of their private incomes to protect themselves from 'strangers', and vote for officials who will spend more of everyone's taxes on more law and order rather than more schools and health clinics; where political candidates run on promises of cutting off services to 'illegal immigrants'; where the media teach us to fear and hate one another and to value violence in the name of 'patriotism' and 'community'. I don't want a city where I am afraid to go out alone at night, or to visit certain neighbourhoods even in a broad daylight; where pedestrians are immediately suspect, and the homeless always harassed. I don't want a city where the elderly are irrelevant and 'youth' is a problem to be solved by more control. I don't want a city where my profession - urban planning - contributes to all of the above, acting as spatial police, regulating bodies in space..."
-Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II, 2003