Mapping Compassion

From Missouri to my alma mater in New Haven, young people feel constant waves of inadmission. Whatever you think of the facts in campus cases recently, you must take seriously the idea that an urban form designed for debate has consistently yielded fear and disbelief. 

I'm not going to engage with questions of free speech or university culture here- others have taken up that debate well. (Read my friend  and sometime editor Mark Oppenheimer here.)  I do want to call attention to the fact that campus designs historically sing out about free debate and public equality and all that dizzying stuff that reads like BS to too many people. Quads and halls and statues, in theory, encourage the kind of introspection that youth have engaged in here. So tions of being mocked or edged out, campuses are in some way failing. 

It might have to do with the kind of stress that students perceive today- that of a world where the job market, the national mission, and the climate give the lie to the claims of order and knowability that the campus form celebrates. We might be seeing racism of a hatefully off-the-cuff sort take root because in times of uncertainty,  the idea that people in authority are insisting that all is in order becomes mockable. And when disorder seems to be holding sway, it's too easy to slip into hateful and incorrect ideas about how to sort the world around you. 

Much ought to change at Missouri, Yale and anywhere else that judging people by race goes on without strong rebuttal. And it may be that one change should come in the form of the campus itself. A campus with more group-designed public spaces and more places where different groups have to mix without planning to (say, a communal umbrella stand in New Haven) might expose the poison of racism more quickly and more broadly than the lawns and arches designed to let Reason drown that poison in good time. 

Conflicting Claims and Limiting Terms

Here in New York, the trope of endless upward wealth plays heavily in the news. Our mayor and other officials have announced plans for more affordable housing and green defenses against floods, and our civic leaders have said (how sincerely only they know) that these enhancements look like asps because they would make for more displacement of low-income folks. 

Nobody is forcing a narrative of rising tides lifting all boats in an era when rising tides seem likely to drown weakly designed coastal homes. But nobody has to lock in on a story about widening gaps either. Public services can serve the public...

...provided their design and funding go before intense public scrutiny. 

The AllBeforeUs framework lets kids assume roles that in real life often slip and slide: developer, public official, underserved senior, new parent, and such. It's stylized because kids can all see and can't easily duck each other. But the critical thinking kids do normally produces consensus on something- litter-reduction campaigns, say, or classes on biodiversity - that seems to shake off the specter of displacement. 

I think what we're seeing in warnings of gentrification is evidence that low-income communities feel cut off from major decisions about where people work, study, and age. And in a time when available real estate is all clustering on the high ground, the feeling of being cut off can debilitate people as well as discourse. 

Public agencies are providing more open data on housing and infrastructure plans than they used to. If civic groups want to look at plans and hammer out specific aspects to change or redesign, they can steer the design of housing and flood barriers in directions that the city wouldn't have derived on its own...

...and that can look like levelers, not separators. Let's see - and let's keep talking. .