Learning From South Phoenix


Comparative Landscape Survey Results

"Old" versus "New"

            Subdivision identity was our mission.  With our gaze as students, we surveyed near Southern and Seventh Avenue in South Phoenix.  Our stealth team consisted of Nikki Holland, Scott Nicholls and I, Ginni Colton.  The “old” neighborhood we decided to observe and measure was near fifth avenue and Southern.  Our team tagged it with “worn and exhausted”.  Secondly, the “new” neighborhood (KB Homes) was put under the scope.  The character’s name was “creepy clean clones”.

            Each neighborhood contains the same data list to be surveyed.  The idea was extracted from authors Kevin S. Blake and Daniel D. Arreola from their piece “Residential Subdivision Identity in Metropolitan Phoenix”.  Blake and Arreola tackle the concern of Phoenix lacking neighborhood identity in subdivisions.   

Each proximity incorporates landscape signatures, both personal and community owned.  We are able to document every category for each neighborhood.  Each has a space, comprised of mailboxes, xeriscape, turf markers, anti-crime features and ethnicity.  Therefore, from an abstract view the neighborhoods are one.  Each locality encompasses all the requirements for a community.

            But dichotomy walks in the backdoor or perhaps through the front gated entrance.  The adjacent neighborhood’s division is overtly evident.  The differences are found in barely standing individual mailboxes to look-alike community ones.  A large difference is in the zoning; one house in the “new” neighborhood sits on one lot, while in the “old” neighborhood four apartments are atop one lot.  But the most distinguishing distinction was the little people.  While surveying the “new”, children were extinct to out eyes on the streets.  A large park, accompanied with a sandbox, basketball court, jungle gym and GRASS was empty of children.  In the “old”, we actually saw children climbing trees, riding bikes and offering as they put it “ghetto car washes”, which we gladly accepted.  Another difference included the expression of one’s self.  In the “old” there was a personal touch, with placement of cars and yard ornamentation.  The “new” was impersonal, each neighbor chooses to look like each other, scared to stand out.  Though one may see an absence of boundaries where both neighborhoods contain families. 

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