Tuesday, February 28, 2012

[246] Mapas de Zonas de Exclusion

El racismo o exclusividad en las areas urbanas es tema comun. Si, tenemos la Fair Housing Act, yadda yadda yadda. Pero en realidad, muchas urbanizaciones y sectores tienen voto de quienes quieren
viviendo junto a ellos. Esquire saco este articulo recientemente y el autor desarrollo un mapa de exclusion de los Estados Unidos, enfocando en las areas que son nasty para los visitantes o que ponen trabas a
nuevos residentes. Les dejo la introduccion debajo:

MAPPING Exclusivity : Exclusion Maps
Interboro Partners: The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion
Though we've lived in a post-Fair Housing Act America more than four decades, that
doesn't mean there aren't still ways for communities to be discriminatory. The way Brooklyn-based architecture firm Interboro Partners sees it, a housing discrimination exists still, through what they call the "Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion," legal policies that may keep some people in, and keep others out. The policies can be subtle, like in the case of "Ave Maria," a Catholic community in Florida created by Tom Monaghan (the founder of Domino's Pizza), which employs what's called an exclusionary mend: Members of the community are required to pay dues to a Catholic church that's built on the property. The policies can be outrageous, as in the case of an ordinance in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, which mandates that only blood relatives can be rented to by owners of single-family homes, if they had become rentals after the disaster. But whether or not the policies are necessarily good or bad can be less than obvious, and in some cases, cause for good: Rainbow Vision, a New Mexico retirement community created for the LGBT community, has created a place for LGBT retirees that can't be matched anywhere, with amenities like drag shows.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/2012-maps-of-the-us-6647201?page=all
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/2012-maps-of-the-us-6647201?src=soc_fcbk#slide-4
http://arsenalofexclusion.blogspot.com/
http://urbanlabglobalcities.blogspot.com/2012/02/todays-map-2012-us-maps.html
http://www.interboropartners.net/2012/the-u-s-of-them/

Animal Zoning Ordinance
Animals have a right to the city too! But most zoning ordinances prohibit animals of the farm variety, declaring them "inharmonious." Inspired in part by the urban agriculture movement, new animal-friendly zoning ordinances such as the one passed by the Cleveland City Council in January, 2009 seek to overturn these
restrictions. —Theresa Schwarz

Annexation/Incorporation
While some cities in the southwest still annex territory, most of the American cities of the midwest and northeast have not expanded much further beyond their 1900s limits (New York, Philadelphia, and St.
Louis haven't added territory since the nineteenth century). As Kenneth Jackson illustrates in Crabgrass Frontier, a combination of new laws that made incorporation easy and annexation unworkable,
improved suburban services, a rising anti-urbanism that came to see the cities like New York as too big, foreign, and ungovernable, and an ensuing desire for home-rule effectively boxed big cities in. Without
tax-revenue sharing, small municipalities — who still relied on the big cities for working, shopping, transportation, and entertainment — depleted the cities' tax bases, and created the city / suburb divide
that still plagues cities today.

Armrest
To deter the homeless from sleeping on park benches, decorative armrests are sometimes installed at the midpoint of the benches, making it impossible (or at least very difficult) to get too comfortable on them.

Automatic Elevators
Automatic elevators (also called Shabbat Elevators) are an
"exclusionary amenity." By automatically stopping on every floor on
Shabbat, they enable Orthodox Jews — who are forbidden from operating
machinery on Shabbat — to live in modern, high-rise buildings. On the
other hand, they are an inconvenience to non-Orthodox Jews, who
typically opt to live elsewhere.

Beach Badge
The use of beach badges to restrict access to beaches proliferated in
the 1960s and 1970s in suburban municipalities in the densely
populated northeastern corridor. Wealthy municipalities along
Connecticut's Gold Coast adopted some of the more extreme measures of
exclusion, allocating beach access permits to residents only,
installing guarded gates at points of entry, and aggressively
patrolling beaches for violators. —Andrew Kahrl

Blood
After Hurricane Katrina, the Council President of St. Bernard Parish
introduced an ordinance mandating that owners of single-family homes
that had not been rentals prior to Hurricane Katrina could only rent
said single-family homes to blood relatives. As 93 percent of St.
Bernard Parish's housing stock was owned by whites at the time of the
storm, the target of the ordinance is pretty clear.

CC&Rs
Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) are rules governing
land use in private communities. Typically drafted by a Homeowners'
Association, or HOA, CC&Rs attempt to guard the property value of
homes in the community by regulating everything from paint colors to
landscape materials to lawn ornaments. CC&Rs are in the Arsenal of
Exclusion because they are often classist (CC&Rs have restricted
aluminum siding, barbecue grills, lawn ornaments, basketball hoops,
and even American flags). In his book Privatopia: Homeowner
Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government, Evan
McKenzie writes of a family in a private development outside
Philadelphia that was forced to remove a swing set because it was made
of metal and not, as the CC&Rs stipulated, wood.

Concierge
The Concierge is essential to the "tourist bubble:" a package of
amenities that are designed to lull in and entertain the tourist while
steering him or her away from unexpected encounters with poverty,
crime, or decay. Tell a concierge in the downtown of an American city
that you are new in town and need some sight-seeing recommendations,
and they are likely to point you towards the same safe,
tourist-friendly, Chamber of Commerce-certified establishments.

Cul de Sac
A cul de sac is a "closed-end street," which produces closure and
discontinuity. Another name for the cul de sac is "dead end."
Interestingly, in 2009, Virginia became the first state to ban (or at
least seriously limit) culs-de-sac from future developments.

Curfew
Teen curfews are arbitrary and legally-murky. Teen Curfews can be less
arbitrary — for example, when Baltimore last year announced a teen
curfew in response to a rash of teen stabbings — but many teen curfews
represent an unlawful imposition of martial law. In early 2010, San
Diego overturned its curfew law due to ambiguous language, and
Indianapolis recently overturned its curfew laws when it determined
that they forcefully undermine adolescents' first amendment rights.
Nonetheless, teen curfews are being implemented in cities and suburbs
around the country.

Eruv
Eruv is a Hebrew term for a symbolic boundary, defined according to
Jewish religious property law, which allows Jews to conduct activities
on the Sabbath (the traditional day of rest) within a broader urban
area that would otherwise be prohibited outside of the home. In the
contemporary city this boundary is typically built by stringing wire
between the tops of existing utility poles, forming an uninterrupted
yet nearly invisible enclosure of "doorframes" (wire between two
poles) that allows the "wall" of the eruv to be maintained. The eruv
is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it allows practicing Jews who
might otherwise be required to segregate themselves to enjoy the
benefits of living within a larger urban area while satisfying the
traditional requirements of religious property law.—Michael Kubo

Fire Hydrant
As much of Duxbury, MA's coast is blocked by large private residences,
the town established a series of public landings allowing waterfront
access at streets dead-ending at the water. However fire hydrants are
often placed directly in front of the only parking spot available at
public landings, thereby excluding those coming from outside the
neighborhood wishing to park and visit the waterfront.—Meredith
Tenhoor and William Tenhoor

Fire Zone
In beach-front communities like New York City's Rockaway, the streets
that dead-end at the beach are sometimes declared "fire zones," on
which parking is prohibited (the houses on these streets all have
driveways). In Rockaway, the ubiquity of fire zones — which are found
on over twenty streets — suggest a non-safety related motivation,
namely, keeping away non-residents who wish to access the beach.

Gate
The gates that guard gated communities offer one of the more obvious
examples of how we keep out "undesirables." Though statistically there
is little evidence that gated communities are safer (or have higher
home values) than non-gated communities, the perception that they are
has led to more and more Americans living in them each year.

Golf Course
As legal scholar Lior Jacob Strahilevitz points out, a golf course is
another type of "exclusionary amenity." Strahilevitz writes that
during the 1980s and 1990s, as African Americans began moving to the
suburbs in growing numbers, the number of "mandatory membership"
residential golf communities in the United States grew significantly.
At the time, golf was the most racially segregated warm weather,
mass-participation sport in America. (In 1997, 93.4 percent of all
American golfers were Caucasian while just 3.1 percent were African
American.) Might developers have discovered a method for creating
racially-homogeneous communities?

Hockey Rink
In 1994 the Division of Parks, Public Grounds & Recreation in the
borough of Glen Rock, NJ, a wealthy, white, suburb of New York City
with a population of 11,232, made a decision to replace two basketball
courts in the town's Wilde Memorial Park with a street hockey rink.
Glen Rock — which is 88 percent White Non-Hispanic — borders Paterson,
an older, poorer city that is 13 percent White Non-Hispanic. The
decision raised eyebrows because the basketball courts were heavily
used by African-Americans from Paterson. It is well known that hockey
is played primarily by whites and basketball primarily by
African-Americans: while 79 percent of NBA players are
African-American, only 2 percent of NHL players are. Moreover hockey —
like golf — is often criticized for being elitist: the equipment
required to play it — skates, sticks, pads, goals — is expensive, and
one typically needs a car to transport it.

Housing Voucher
The large-scale use of housing vouchers began in 1966, when Dorothy
Gautreaux and 43,000 other Chicago public housing tenants sued the
Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the federal Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) for discrimination. This case eventually
led to the Gautreaux Demonstration Project, where people were given
vouchers to move from inner city public housing to private housing all
over the Chicago metropolitan area, city and suburbs. Today, housing
vouchers are among the most progressive weapons in the Arsenal of
Inclusion, as they give the poor access to low-poverty communities
with good access to jobs, education, and health. —Damon Rich

Immigrant Recruitment
In a bid to save itself from a shrinking population and economic base
after General Electric Co. and other industries left the city,
Schenectady, NY actively recruited Guyanese immigrants from Richmond
Hill, Queens, a Borough of New York City. Starting with bus tours, the
Mayor of Schenectady went to unusual lengths to attract new residents
to dilapidated neighborhoods in his town of 62,000. Attracted by the
availability of affordable housing, in a few years the Guyanese
community in Schenectady swelled to 7,000, contributing to the local
economy by opening shops and restaurants and reclaiming much of
Schenectady's housing stock.—Julie Behrens, Kaja Kühl

Inclusionary Zoning
Inclusionary Zoning or Inclusionary Housing requires developers to
make a percentage of housing units in new residential developments
available to low and moderate-income households. A major victory for
inclusionary zoning took place in 1975 in Mount Laurel, NJ, where the
Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. successfully argued that there
is a constitutional obligation for municipalities to produce
affordable housing. Eventually, this led to the Mount Laurel Doctrine,
which continues to encourage the development of affordable housing in
New Jersey.

Lavender-Lining
Gays and lesbians have long conveyed queerness through the performance
of personal style, but it was only after the birth of the modern gay
rights movement that they began to openly delimit queer territory,
using sexual orientation as a tool of inclusion to create communities
that celebrated queerness, most famously in the Castro in San
Francisco and in Northampton, Massachusetts. However the movement also
produced places like Alapine, a lesbian-only community in Alabama.
—Gabrielle Esperdy

Map
In 2007, The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a Los Angeles-based group that
leads creative explorations of everyday habitats, made maps and led
safaris that helped people "find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on
a Malibu beach legally and safely." Despite ubiquitous "private
property" signs found up and down Malibu beaches, numerous easements
and other "loopholes" exist that enable individuals to legally occupy
them. The safaris include skills-enhancing activities like a
public-private boundary hike, sign watching, a no-kill hunt for
accessways, and a public easement potluck.

Minimum Lot Size
Minimum Lot Size regulations, typically found in municipal zoning
codes, define the smallest lot size that a building can be built on.
Minimum Lot Size is in the Arsenal of Exclusion because suburban
municipalities use them to exclude affordable housing, public housing,
and the poor, for whom building on large lots is not possible. An
early exclusionary use of Minimum Lot Size regulations can be found in
New Caanan, CT, which in 1932 zoned 4,000 undeveloped acres "two-acre
residential."

"No Loitering" Sign
Loiterers have it tough. Consider the following, taken from the
website ehow.com: "People who loiter will often do some type of damage
to property, such as tagging buildings with graffiti or damaging
concrete with skateboards. Loiterers are sometimes associated with the
sale of illicit drugs... In short, loiterers almost always do some
level of damage to your business, and rarely provide anything
positive." How do you keep loiterers away? For the scourge of
teenagers and homeless people everywhere, the "No Loitering" Sign is
the most commonly-used weapon homeowners and businesses use to
discourage people from hanging out outside their buildings.

No-Cruising Zone
Cruising, or driving a motor vehicle past a traffic control point more
than twice within a designated period of time (usually about two
hours), has been a staple social activity of Americans as long as cars
have been symbols of social status. Many small towns have a route, or
"strip," that is an identified cruise zone, and have "cruising nights"
when cars drive slowly, bumper-to-bumper through urban boulevards or
small town centers. No-cruising zones are a weapon used by
municipalities to block recreational driving, and ergo, this
conglomeration of supposedly "anti-establishment" youth. In 1999, the
ACLU Utah unsuccessfully tried to overturn Salt Lake City's
no-cruising zone, stating that it "seeks to criminalize lawful
conduct" and "extends to innocuous behavior far removed from the
problem it seeks to remedy." Alas, Salt Lake City's no-cruising zone
remains in effect.

NORC SSP
NORC stands for "Naturally Occurring Retirement Community." On the one
hand, a NORC is just a building or neighborhood that wasn't planned as
a retirement facility, but that has a large elderly population. But
NORC also refers to Social Service Providers (SSPs) that retroactively
service such buildings or neighborhoods with the amenities — home
health care, transportation, education, and entertainment — that are
found in "purpose-built" retirement facilities. NORC is in the Arsenal
of Inclusion because it is a potential foil to the phenomenon of
geriatric ghettoization, whereby senior citizens are segregated in
isolated, purpose-built retirement communities.

One-Way Street
Greenmount Avenue between 33rd Street and Cold Spring Lane in
Baltimore is a wall. On the east side, 85% of residents are black, 16%
have a Bachelor degree, and the median income is $40,000. On the west
side, 96% of residents are white, 75% have a Bachelor degree, and the
median income is $75,000. Such rapid shifts in demographics are common
in Baltimore, but this stretch of Greenmount Avenue is interesting for
the physical devices that one side deploys to maintain a disconnect
from the other. For example, of the eight streets that intersect
Greenmount Avenue between 33rd Street and Cold Spring Lane, only one
(39th Street) allows travel from east to west. Six of the streets are
one-way pointing east (i.e., out of the wealthy, white side), and one
of the streets (34th Street) thwarts westward movement with bollards.

Questionnaire
In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing
Us Apart, Bill Bishop writes about how the developers of the Ladera
Ranch, a planned community in Orange County, California, used a
questionnaire to steer prospective home buyers into one of its
lifestyle-themed developments. Thus for those who "see the Earth as a
living system" there is "Terramor," which features bamboo floors, and
photovoltaic cells. Across the way, in a development called "Winners,"
houses are more colonial than craftsman.

Racial Steering
Racial steering refers to the illegal practice whereby real estate
brokers guide prospective homebuyers towards or away from certain
neighborhoods based on their race. Racial steering is not a thing of
the past: in 2006, Corcoran, one of New York City's biggest real
estate brokerage companies, made headlines when a sting operation by
the National Fair Housing Alliance revealed that Corcoran brokers were
drawing maps of Brooklyn that outlined neighborhoods that were
"changing." The maps — whose source was a Census map showing percent
change in numbers of African-Americans — were used to show white
families where they should consider living. The map was not shown to
black families with similar financial qualifications.

Regional Contribution Agreement
If, under an inclusionary zoning provision, a developer is required to
set aside a percentage of the units for affordable housing, the
developer can in some states enter into an agreement with a separate
municipality, and effectively pay it to build the units. These
agreements are called Regional Contribution Agreements. They are
dubious because forcing affordable housing away from wealthier housing
discourages a mixture of areas and only serves to reinforce
ghettoization. An example of Regional Contribution Agreements are New
Jersey's COAH laws, which were created in response to the state's
Mount Laurel decision (see "Inclusionary Zoning").

Residential Parking Permit
Residential parking permits create restricted parking districts and
exclude the larger public from specific areas. While Residential
Parking Permits make sense in congested, residential areas next to
universities, medical institutions, sports complexes or tourist
attractions, they are often established and enforced in very
low-traffic neighborhoods that have plenty of street parking
available, especially wealthy ones that are next to poor ones.

School District
The stellar reputation of some public schools can segregate family
households from non-family households, especially in urban areas. When
a family is in a good district, the money mom and dad save not having
to send Ella and Emma to private school is tacked on to the cost of
housing. This in turn results in a self-sorting: people who don't have
kids find that it is not worth their while to live in the district,
and opt (or are forced) to live somewhere else where rent is cheaper
(and where they might find retail amenities less suited to the needs
of young parents).

Sidewalk Management Plan
Portland's sidewalk management plan proposes a 6' — 8' "pedestrian use
zone" in which pedestrians "must move immediately to accommodate the
multiple users of the sidewalk." Importantly, the zone measures out
from the property line, ruling out leaning on (or sleeping on)
buildings. Such a plan isn't needed on the sidewalks of midtown
Manhattan; what justifies one in relatively serene downtown Portland?
Needless to say, this is a barely disguised attempt to rid downtown
Portland of homeless people.

Skywalk
Skywalks are elevated bridges that create interior connections between
adjacent buildings. Many cold-weather cities have extensive skywalk
systems: Calgary has one that is ten miles long. In Minneapolis, which
boasts the largest continuous skywalk system in the United States,
skywalks span 8 miles and connect 69 blocks of the city's downtown.
While the appeal of skywalks is obvious to anyone who has visited
places like Calgary and Minneapolis in the Winter, the fact that
skywalks can be privately owned and controlled appealed to other, less
frost-bitten cities, who used them to build a secondary,
access-restricted circulation system that avoided confrontation with
the elements of the public sidewalk below.

Stoop
Functionally, the stoop provides formal access to the parlor-level
floor of a brownstone, townhouse, or rowhouse. Stoops are in the
Arsenal of Inclusion because they are semi-private spaces that have
the qualities of openness and community, but also an unspoken boundary
of ownership. In some neighborhoods, they promote interaction and
communication among residents of a street or block. At their best,
they are crucibles of neighborhood gossip and observation.

Ultrasonic Noise
"Is your business suffering from anti social youths driving your
customers away? Are you bothered by crowds of teenagers hanging around
your street or business and making life unpleasant?" These questions
come from the website of "kids be gone," the exclusive North American
importer for the Mosquito Kid Deterrent Device, a small box that
emits, as the name suggests, a high frequency sound that only
teenagers can hear (persons over 20 typically can't hear high
frequencies in the range of 18 to 20 kHz). The company's website brags
that the Mosquito has been successfully used in railway stations,
shops, and, of course, shopping malls.

Ave Maria
Ave Maria is a master-planned, Catholic-themed town just northeast of
Naples, Florida. Developed by Domino's Pizza founder and Roman
Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan, Ave Maria puts Catholicism at
the center of community life, a fact that is evidenced by the 100 foot
tall, neo-Gothic oratory in the main square. Through the Ave Maria
Foundation, Monaghan also controls a new Catholic university, Ave
Maria University, which has over 600 students and is planned to
accommodate up to 5,000.

Snowflake
Snowflake is an "Environmental Isolation" community in Arizona, where
a group of people with debilitating sensitivities to certain chemicals
live in about thirty homes on large, widely-spaced lots. Snowflake
offers isolation and neutrality to individuals who would otherwise
suffer from exposure to life-threatening ailments and diseases. Have
an aversion to common house paints and solvents? Snowflake's rigid
product guidelines include a provision that bans them. Originally
founded by two Mormons (last names: "Snow" and "Flake"), the community
offers privacy and isolation for people unable to healthfully exist in
other, more chemically saturated, areas.

Rainbow Vision
Rainbow Vision, a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender)
retirement community near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, provides a familiar array of resort and retirement
community amenities to a demographic underserved by planned
communities. (The untapped market has been highly successful as three
more branches are soon opening in the Bay Area and Palm Springs,
California, and Vancouver, Canada.) Whether providing assisted-living
services to the elderly, or offering Wednesday night drag shows in the
community center, the development offers an inclusive array of
activities and properties for those attracted to a GLBT-centric
environment. Even heterosexual homebuyers have been attracted to the
spa, dancing, and nightlife that the community offers.

Sky Village
The residents of Arizona's Sky Village, a planned community at the
foot of the Chiricahua Mountains, use their homes to indulge a passion
for the night sky. Amateur astronomers, stargazers, and outdoor buffs
alike find solace in this low-light, sparsely electrified community of
time-share haciendas. Far from any significant city and located in one
of America's darkest regions, denizens of Sky Village enjoy night-time
hikes, evenings gazing through their personal telescope, or cocktail
parties with fellow astro-geeks.

Jumbolair
That's not thunder you hear overhead: that's a 707 Jetliner
approaching Jumbolair's 7,550 foot runway in time for dinner at one of
the development's 29 contiguous estates. While the commute from this
Ocala, Florida community might be measured in nautical miles,
everything else resembles the private glitz of a gated neighborhood,
from the gated entryway to its formal dining hall. Originally a 380
acre horse farm, Jumbolair was first licensed in 1984 as a fly-in
community, one of several across the nation, but the only one with
private taxi-ways for its jet-lagged residents.

Peace Village
Peace Village, a 265-home suburban subdivision outside Toronto, looks
like a typical North American suburb, until one notices that its
streets and culs de sac are dedicated to prominent Muslim thinkers. In
fact, Peace Village was built for members of Ahmadiyya, an Islamic
sect that fled Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s to avoid religious
persecution. The subdivision has unassumingly given these Muslims
refuge, as well as license to live according to their conventions
within a modern, Western city. A mosque built into the subdivision
dominates the skyline, prayer speakers (mounted on poles in the
parking lot) call residents to prayer each morning, and in the homes,
dual sitting rooms separate men and women at social gathering, while
heavy-duty ventilation equipment attenuates the strong odor of Middle
Eastern cooking in each kitchen.

To learn more about Interboro Partners, see their Web site.
Credits: Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore, Rebecca
Beyer Winik, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez (illustrator).
Interesante ver lo creativos que somos para segregarnos en subgrupos…

2 comments:

antigonum cajan said...

About Northampton, the Capital of the Daughters of Lesbos...The amount of them lesbians is pretty much like hordes in history books.

I remember trying to watch a movie in which a heterosexual couple was kissing while them lesbian bitches hollered in disgust at every kiss.

Screw them lesbians...

Beato said...

I'm rather tolerant of other sexual orientations (and religoins and politics) as long as they respect my opinions, even if they disagree.
For instance I finished reading a couple of months ago Fun House by Al;ison Bechedel, a lesbian artist. Rven if I disagree with her lesbianism I like a story well told. Here's her bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Bechdel
But then, I recall a house with a lesbian couple that was near my college apartment in Mayaguez. The cat fights were monumental since they believed they were tough and macho. Not like queer fights that are all soppy and whiny.
Anyway, I wish I had extended this to the local gated communities and their stupid laws or the exclusion zones on beaches by the expensive hotels. On a later article I guess...

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