Never Forget One Specific Community

The main reason makes me writing this blog is that part of me do not agree with Spatial Justice. It does not mean that I think Spatial Justice is meaningless, on the contrary, I believe that Spatial Justice is very crucial for our society. What I truly do not believe is the ideal status mentioned in Edward W. Soja's article named The City and Spatial Justice which is listed as following.

In the broadest sense, spatial (in)justice refers to an intentional and focused emphasis on the spatial or geographical aspects of justice and injustice. As a starting point, this involves the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them.

Personally, this standpoint is kind of Marxism which believes that human will share the resources eventually without thinking the value they create. From my perspective, it is somehow same as the point that people can share the same place with same opportunities.  I am going to talk about my understanding of this topic in following aspects.

Firstly, people are born differently with their own characters, which will lead to different preference, habit, the experience of life, education. Hence, it is very easy to make different people play different role in society and have various performance. For example, some of them may like having a party outside and playing music at the same time, while others prefer staying in somewhere which is silent. I am only showing the different preference of people with saying which one is better. But you can imagine that those who like quiet atmosphere may call the police to protect them from the noise of the party if they live close to each other.  There are lots of example of people cannot get along with each other very well because of their different habits and I think most of people met this situation previously. So I think it is not wise to make all people share the same place. My suggestion is that communities with same characters is capable of sharing the same place.

Secondly, communities have their own place, which is same as the standpoint of feminist, that is, the right of women does not mean that women should act like men. Women have their own characters, they should do what is suitable for them and what they like. The communities have their own special characters, why we have to merge those with different characters together or force them to share the same space? It will make both of them feel uncomfortable.

From what has been discussed above, my point is never forgetting any community. To be more specific, we should improve the life quality of each community based its context instead of focusing on one community. I believe that people live in a bad neighborhood want to escape from poverty and live in a better neighborhood, but I still do not think it is good for them to be sent to a good neighborhood directly. As an architect, what we can do is improving the life quality of the slum by creating some socially responsive architectures (Rural Studio written by Samuel Mockbee ), which can provide people living in these areas with more chances to have a better life and make themselves better. Then they will escape from the poverty naturally and merge themselves with their desired communities in an easier way.

Finally, I would like to come to the conclusion that spatial justice is important, but it is impossible to be that ideal status. Comparing with working hard to try to make all people share the same place, the wiser way is never abandoning any community and help people merge with other communities naturally with all the existing communities still existing.