Let's Step it Up, Folks

"They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture."

This quote is in reference to the bourgeois and people of lavish lifestyles from Lefebvre's "The Right to the City" and I think it best summarizes the overall reading and the challenge that we deal with as designers today. We always talk about gentrification, public space, the flaws of suburb housing, etc. But we are the very people who are blindly designing for the bourgeois when we provide appealing designs for buildings and spaces in communities. We design for the people and if its successful (which is the goal) then people want to be around that and incorporate themselves with the end product. A lot of the time we are asked to design in places that need a bit of a face lift for the community, and its a domino effect from there as a bunch of new buildings start to go up and the people with less opportunity to prosper get forced out. And there we just produced a community full of yuppies and ditched the true community we swore to serve. Portland, OR is a perfect example of this (Mississippi Avenue to be specific).

We design for public space and try to provide for the community that exists right now, but that design will hopefully do its intended purpose and then more of the same thing happens, here come the yuppies in their ripped jeans, chucks, medium fades and those awful circular ray ban spectacles. Its not their fault, we all are guilty of it and we should use the space if we have the access to it. But we as designers (along with other professions) laid the groundwork for these folks to march on in.

                                Mississippi Avenue during one of its events.

In the end, I start to wonder if we as architects are succeeding in designing for underprivileged communities or if the developers are with their cookie cutter houses. Yeah, we talk about this stuff in school and ask how we stop this, but I think it kind of stops there. And yeah, the developers are putting up these cookie cutter housing developments at a cyclic rate, but if you check the prices on these things they are much more affordable for families and promise a neighborhood to develop itself as a community if you just throw a little park and running path through it. In the end, money prevails and it will find its way to the new stuff that we design. This is extremely unfortunate and I really do wonder how we counter this?