there's our catastrophe

Anonymous asked: what's your stance on yards? do you prefer frontyards to backyards? are you anti-yard altogether?

open space is really important!  especially for kids.  when it comes to private yards, I favour neither frontyards nor backyards, but courtyards, peranakan style. maybe my opinion on this would be different if I lived in a cooler climate, but for places where it regularly gets >35C, they’re the greatest. 

but that’s a kind of liminal space between inside and outside, not a yard in the sense you mean, right?  really I’m kind of anti-yard, in that I’m in favour of pooling our open space to create more parks and fewer yards.  On the other hand, you sometimes have to fight for your right to use communal open spaces.  they can be dangerous; they can be taken from you.  but the home can also be dangerous, isolation within the home is dangerous, ultimately I believe that it’s more realistic to make society as a whole less dangerous, make our lives more public, decrease isolation, than to make every single home safe.

rgr-pop:

remember when the Associated Press determined that Ann Arbor was the least segregated city in Michigan because its population was 7% black instead of 50% black or 80% black or 20 % black in a state that’s 15% black

by “segregation is a problem” we know everyone means “oh god there are a lot of black people in detroit” not “ann arbor is a majority white city just outside of the blackest city in the country and has been pretty strongly responsible for uneven distribution of resources in the region for a very long time now”

I think the context around the use of the term “segregation” when referring specifically to Black people in the USA, in a specific city, is really important.  Having said that, I think it’s relevant that last year I read a lot of policy from Australia, North America and Europe that was concerned with “segregation” or “ghettoisation” or similar concepts in the urban environment.  Without exception, an area was considered segregated and in need of a policy response if it had a large population of people of colour or otherwise ethnically marginalised people; without exception, disproportionately white areas were not considered “segregated”.  This was also true of poverty: poor people living together are ghettoised and need to be broken out of that with gentrification, rich people living together is just the way of the world.  Discourses of “integration” in urban policy are almost all progressive-sounding ways to talk about large groups of marginalised people as a problem. Basically you’re right and this is a huge issue in other places as well. 

groanemics:

the interesting thing about one direction is that their iconography is so london-centric when in fact 4 of them are from the north (i like to think that, in the event of bitter internecine north-south war, the industrial midlands would take the side of the north) and one of them isn’t even from the uk

like the whole one thing video is them larking about in hyde (?) park and passing notable london landmarks on an open top bus

it’s peculiarly circular - they’re only allowed access to this sterile, faux-neutralising visual language of ‘britishness’ because they’re an international phenomenon that makes tons of money, but they could only have become an international phenomenon that makes tons of money by dissolving their (radically different) regional identities entirely within that language

the shallowness of the british-industrial complex laid bare 

doreen massey has written some really top-notch stuff about the idea of london and what the actual effects are of the UK being increasingly identified with london, increasing concentration of population and resources in London, etc

basically, the identification of the UK with london and the reinforcement of this through the circulation of twee London-y imagery hurts brits