Whose side are you on?

“We also increasingly live in divided, fragmented and conflict-prone cities. How we view the world and define possibilities depends on which side of the tracks we are on and to what kinds of consumerism we have access to.”

For some reason, there is always a very two-sided mindset when it comes to politics. Perhaps it is easier to just pick from two existing solutions – it is clearly more difficult to offer a new and better solution. Some of my only firsthand experience is in America so I will speak to that, but would love to hear from the diversity of our classmates from other places. For example in the US, you either have to be democratic or republican to feel like your vote will be counted. Very slowly, the third parties are making a very slow grab for power, but they are not growing fast enough. I hate that people feel they have to side with one side or the other when there is so much fault in both sides of the two “great” deciding parties. As we have seen with the latest national election, the conflict has arisen to a new level. In my opinion social media has given people a way to voice their opinions in ways that have never been seen in previous elections and everyone feels they have an opinion or voice in the matter. Yet, ironically, the voting attendance continues to be lower than it has ever been. People all want to shout their opinions but when it comes to actually voting people don’t do the most important part of the democratic process – VOTE!

I really appreciated the concise response as a “solution” to these social conflicts:

“One step towards unification of these struggles is to focus on the right to the city as both a working slogan and a political ideal, precisely because it focuses on who it is that commands the inner connection that has prevailed from time immemorial between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of the right to the city and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative, if the dispossessed are to take back control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded and if new modes of controlling capital surpluses as they work through urbanization processes are to be instituted. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.”

I think this statement is powerful, but how do we give democratization back to the people when the majority of people are not going to vote and have their opinion heard in the first place? And how do we, as architects, use politics to our advantage without displacing people and causing gentrification??