Urban Anthropology/Urban Studies: Ethnographic Mappings of the 100 Mile City, Prof. Koptiuch-- Spring 2001

INDEX:

• George Awuor, Dream City Nepalon
• Urusula Colberg, Fantasia
• Kelly Doll
• Radiah Hudson, Perennial
• Royce Jenkins,
• Kristin Koptiuch, Phoenicia
• Lisa Martin, Give Me Back My Path
• Beth Mooney, Clouds and Mountains
• Cathy Patterson, The City, the Megalopolis, the Civic Heartbeat of the Land
• Josh Rothman
• Kim Smith-Dodson, The Valley
• Matt Tweedie, Invisible City

Walter Webster, The City of Webdromain

My dream city Nepalon where the skies are light blue during the day and the stars of the night shine never twitching. My city has beautiful houses made of wood, plastic and glass, beautiful lawns and gardens. The houses are arranged beautifully in rows and the vast number makes me wonder if there are any tress left in the world. The city has tall buildings that touch the thin clouds in the sky. The shops in the city sell almost anything including animals, human body parts and organs. The people here have magical tricks that can change the color of their eyes, size of their bodies and even extend their lives. They are usually in their banker like houses either eyes glued on their TV or computer screens, running various chores or just busy working. The banker mobiles they drive form beautiful patterns like worker -ants collecting food in preparation for the harsh weather. My dream city never sleeps as people work in shifts keeping the city awake 24 hrs a day. The sky has beautiful white patterns of smoke from the metal birds in the sky. These huge birds ferry people to far cities beyond the oceans.

The city is not all beds of roses. There are many problems including traffic problems caused by the large number of banker mobiles on the many highways of Nepalon. One may wonder how this traffic problem can be solved when there are so many mobiles on the roads. It may be easy to notice that each mobile although usually big enough to carry many people, there is usually never more that one person in these mobiles at a time.

There has been serious contamination of the natural water supply systems and the mass development of the city has led to destruction of the delicate ecosystems in the area. The city grows at an alarming rate and there are no open spaces left. There are no animals roaming around in their natural habitat anymore. Humans have taken over! The city consumes almost half of the total world production even though the population of Nepalon is only  1/8 of the total world population. The most popular words in this city are ME, ME, MORE.

Greenstuff is the widely known god. There are those in the city who care less for this god but have failed to persuade the rest of the population to realize that ancient God still lives.

My dream city is also a nightmare.

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My city, called Fantasia, would have segments of all kinds of cities on the globe.
Skyscrapers, made from glass and stone with staples similar to Manhattan’s Chrysler
Building would represent the core, where people mostly work and do business.

A belt of entertainment centers would follow this core. A stadium, like the Olympic
Stadium in Munich, tennis courts like flushing meadows, a concert hall like the Oyster of
 Sydney, museums like the Louvre in Paris and an Opera house like in Vienna would
follow.

The living area for people would be the next belt Apartment complexes would
reflect the pictures of  Hundertwasser, a famous Austrian painter and architect. Single
homes would show all kind of styles from Swiss Chalets to modern desert villas; not to
forget houses in the old Victorian style as well.

Imbedded in those housing areas would be the every day shopping areas. Various little shops, not big boxes, with all kind of goods and services necessary for daily life. Each square mile housing area representing a small town of itself.

The following belt would consist of parks, lakes and not to forget the, for many people
 useless, but nice looking golf courses; simply the great outdoors of a city.

Situated to the eastside of Fantasia, so that the breeze from the west cannot blow the noise over the city, would be  a gigantic airport with multiple runways, like the new air port of Hongkong,

All belts of Fantasia are connected with each other through wide roads, seemed by green
bands of trees and flowerbeds similar to those which can be seen in Paris in summer time.

Fantasia is a modern but romantic city with many cultures but only one language so
people wouldn’t get confused simply because of language. They, however, still could
enjoy the various beautiful and also sometimes odd things of different cultures.

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People are always on the move in the City of Motion.  In this highly populated metropolis, new ways of getting somewhere in a hurry are being implemented daily.  And the demand for more ideas is staggering.  The city is constantly in motion, with the moving city streets and the city stairs that have been replaced by escalators.  Need to go up?  No problem, there will always be an elevator nearby.  The skys are filled with small planes specially designed for city travel.

In this city, one never has to worry about purchasing tickets early to reserve the good spots.  Arenas, theaters, and the like are all equipped with moving seats.  Everybody pays for general admission, since all get to enjoy the same views.  There are moving walkways inside the malls, and moving isles at the grocery store.  Convenience stores now come to you.

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The city of Perennial was once a vast, open expanse of possibilities to the founders from a not so distance past.  The city sprouted and grew slowly, steadily like some delicate desert flower.  As the city began to bloom and reach for the ever-shining sun it required more nourishment than its foundation could provide.  The founders borrowed the resources that they needed to insure Perennial’s growth.  As the city spread out like roots searching for water the citizens began to forget about Perennial’s center bloom.  The citizens were too preoccupied with that vast expanse that seemed to go on forever.  Every inch that seemed out of reach was almost too much for them to bear.  They seemed compelled to stretch Perennial to the ends of the earth.  The ever-present sun seeming to increase their desire to move forward.  As the citizens cultivated the, newer more pristine blooms of Perennial they did not notice that the original blossom began to whither.  The withering was quickly turning to rot and the rot was beginning to spread throughout Perennial.  The forgotten citizens of center Perennial were to busy trying to combat the rot that they had no resources with which to follow the growth.  The citizens who were building outer Perennial did not seem to see or smell or taste the rot following them from the center to their pristine and ever growing Perennial.  They were being given all the resources they needed from the rotting center and did not realize that when the foundation dies the roots have not f\reason for existence.  Without a foundation to cultivate, the citizens have no purpose and they will have to leave their beloved Perennial and its core to rot and return to the earth from which it sprung.

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Late 1960's the lights went out at 9pm during the late summer days.  We were up before the crack of dawn, to be precise 4am.  We had to catch the bus for the long ride to the fields.  At 4:30am we were on the bus, there were five of us total, brothers.  The bus would make many stops before arriving at the final destination, the onion fields.  On the bus we settled in and fall asleep.  Not much to do but sleep, everybody spoke Mexican.  By 6am we piled off the bus and grabbed our gunnysacks and buckets. Once the air filled with the smell of onions we knew we could get a few more minutes of sleep. As a matter of fact the stronger the smell the closer we knew it was picking time.  We could distinguish between the different smells of vegetables and citrus trees. The fields looked like a city of onions everywhere you looked nothing but rows and rows of onions.  You had to have a knack to picking them one wrong clip and you had tears, yet the Mexican's had no problem with this, they knew the tricks of the trade, clip carefully.  They have always picked onions when they were in season.  The sun would just be rising when we arrived at the onion fields and settling back down on the trip back home.  The bus is gone now, and so are many of the onion fields.  The trips from Dobbins Road and 7th Avenue to the onion fields are now covered by the 101 bypass, homes, and shopping centers.  Now there are only patches of green fields left.  I still remember the smell of onions. The city has grown fast; many of fields have disappeared and replaced with concrete and asphalt roads.   The home I now live in now covers those fields, when the ground is wet the aroma seems to filter up through the ground were vegetables once sprawled over the area.  Once in a while I can catch the scent of onions in the air, close my eyes and see the fields.

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Phoenicia can be reached in only two ways: legally and illegally.  The city displays one face to the traveler arriving with documentation and a different face to s/he who arrives undocumented. From these words you realize at once that all its inhabitants see Phoenicia through the eyes of a foreigner.  And because of this it is futile to attempt to read the wrinkles of Phoenicia’s past because each traveler, upon arrival, attempts to recreate in Phoenicia the city s/he has already lost to memory, erased like shifting subdivisions erase the desert that Phoenicia surrounds.  Like a dream, Phoenicia is a rebus that conceals its inhabitants’ desires or fears even as it is entirely built out of them.

Shunning the old city of memory or perhaps of fiction, the documented travelers build a defensive city: their residences (whether palatial or modest) are ringed with walls and guarded by gates and surveillance mechanisms; their workplaces occupy short towers surrounded by defensive corporate parks or are shrouded in stealthy, nondescript back-offices doubling as terminals tapped into the grid of an increasingly transnational force field; they shop in marketplaces that simulate the old arcades, now housed in big boxes severed from the street; they govern in shadow and privatize public space the better to ward off the expected contest to their rule. And despite this defensive strategy, or more probably because of it, they nostalgically attempt to confabulate a sublime civic community that continually eludes them.

The undocumented travelers at first must occupy only the interstices of the defensive city, and the ruins abandoned by the documented as their ever-exurbian evasion of a feared center city stretches Phoenicia into nothing but an edge that is only the outskirts of itself.  But recognizing no familiar or legible signs in which they can delight after such a determined and arduous journey, the undocumented build a palimpsest city superimposed onto Phoenicia’s endless expanse.  Unexpectedly, instead of the evasive strategy of the documented, legitimate city dwellers, the Phoenicia that the undocumented create boldly announces their presence: they paint their houses in luminous, look-at-me hues, their music peals loudly in neighborhood and thoroughfare, they invest their low-slung autos with infinite care and proudly park them prominently on their front yards; they reinvent here their traditional marketplaces, restaurants (sometimes in forms that mimic their own migratory peregrinations), and sell fine custom made botas and lacey quinceanera dresses.  Soon carnicerias, yerberias, curanderias, taquerias, appear all over Phoenicia.  Soon the undocumented, disguised as landscapers, maids, construction workers, dishwashers, nannies, or day laborers, infiltrate the fortresses of the defensive city.  Soon the city they had inscribed with a vocabulary of things and negotiated with mute gestures becomes alive with a Babel of tongues no longer foreign to their Phoenicia today, as it once was not in one of Phoenicia’s already erased pasts.

The documented travelers discover in the ever-new Phoenicia one of their possible pasts, or something that once had been a possible future of theirs but is now someone else’s present.  The Phoenicia they tried to evade is now everywhere, but only now and then do the documented realize--and at such moments they scurry to convince themselves otherwise--that they have become such a part of the inferno they had tried to escape that they can no longer see it.  The undocumented, who always already knew they had arrived into the midst of the inferno, have begun to recognize that they themselves are not inferno.  Their question is, can they take up the space necessary for their culture to endure unbesieged in the new Phoenicia?

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Walking across 32nd Street and heading north towards Bell Road, I am able to cut across the desert to save some time.  This is a good thing because I am already late for school.  Having missed the bus again, I am able to lose myself in deep thought as I walk safely and mindlessly towards my high school.  This day is no different than most.  The sun is shining brightly and there are but a few cars on the road to watch out for.  It is always a peaceful and quiet stroll to my destination.

Fast-forward ten years.  Even if I wanted to take that same path to school, it would be impossible.  Crossing over 32nd Street can only be done at designated markings and should be done with extreme caution as cars are constantly flowing in either direction and running red lights is done as easily as failing to stay within the posted speed limit.  Moreover, the desert no longer exists as residential and commercial buildings cover it now.  The safety of walking from home to school (and vice-versa) has long disappeared.

I realize that progress is the result of change.  However, I question those responsible for growth in the metropolitan Phoenix area over the past twenty years as well as those individuals mapping our growth over the next generation.  I believe that Phoenix is lacking in many areas.  It is as though we want to be internationally known as a major city within the United States but all we have accomplished is the building of larger homes on smaller lots, traffic delays and more smog than we know what to do with.  We maintain deficiencies in areas such as cultural diversity, large corporate presence to sustain growth and true visibility of the arts to name a few.  Here are some facts.  Arizona is the state that refused to institute the MLK holiday until there was pressure from sports and other organizations threatening to boycott our state, thereby reducing our revenue.  We maintain a very small corporate business infrastructure.  Of the few big name companies we do have, they are struggling to survive, much less provide our city with jobs and economic stability (see FINOVA, Viad, Dial, Phelps Dodge).  As for the arts, we are not exhibiting the type of production we should be given the fact that we are the sixth largest city in the country.

Progress is the result of change.  Ugh!  Somebody please give me back my desert and peaceful walks that are void of traffic, buildings and crime.  This is one of few exceptions where it is better to go back rather than move forward.

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The drive back into Phoenix on I-10 from Los Angeles, from San Diego, from most places where Phoenicians regularly vacation, seems to last an eternity.  Crossing the desert can force impatient passengers into neck-twisting slumber.  But the sky and mountains that reach toward the West coast from this oasis that we call home also stand above us like an open gate, welcoming us back into a security blanket of normalcy, daily rituals, recognition, and comfort.  It’s where we’ve chosen to hang our hats.

Comfort is hard to come by in this city of migrants, because it’s like no other place we’re from.  There are few mom-and-pop’s on the corners of our neighborhoods.  People talk on cell phones while they grocery shop rather than discuss the poor state of lettuce selection in the produce section.  Orange groves that once filled the air with their essence give way to the almighty dollar and relegate the land to stagnancy beneath a hundred houses divided by six-foot cinder-block walls, houses that appear to be designed by the same firm that designed Taco Bell restaurants.  Ice cream shops go out of business in a city with a million people, and an average annual temperature of 80 degrees.  The distinct lack of community on the surface can inspire desperation for connectivity throughout the city.

We feel that lack until we see the lights from I-10 or I-17, forty to sixty minutes out of town.  We can’t wait to sleep in our own beds.  We miss our best friends.  We want to chat with the funniest guy on the planet who works in our mailroom.  We want to take the test and get it over with!  We want to talk with the other soccer parents while sitting in the bleachers.  We want to find new places with good, cheap margaritas that let us sit in a booth and smoke cigarettes in air-conditioned rooms.  We want to run across the street at ten in the morning, and swim in our neighbors’ pools until our mothers call us home for dinner.  We want to lay in the grass, prickly from dehydration, and see the angels and dinosaurs in the clouds.

We find the comfort, in the mountains and in the clouds, when the memories of our originating places give way to our present.  We daydream of impending fame in pools of sweat, lying in our bedrooms that absorb the brunt of the afternoon sun.  We stop longing to see a blue house next to a lime-green house next to a pink house.  We only get to use our fireplaces once in awhile, so it’s way more exciting.   We envy those who boast, “I’m a native,” even though we spout an almost arrogant knowledge of a different way of life we lived someplace else.  The idea of home shifts from the Mississippi River or the Atlantic Coast to this new, strange and functionally anonymous place, miles and towns away from the renowned landmarks that cast an identity upon Arizona.

We talk about the Suns and Diamondbacks with the guy in the logo t-shirt, and about how hot it is outside.  We wear a superficial, white face, and say things like, “WHAT culture?!” and completely ignore the centuries of history embedded into everything we have let rot since we invaded this land all over again.  We, a vast population mostly constructed by people who accepted the transfer or fell into a ground-floor business, and their children, make the best of the barren, quite literally make our own landmarks in our own neighborhoods, and turn the nothingness into something real, however unreal it feels in times of loneliness.

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We call it uptown, downtown, the pueblo, the village,  the hamlet, the dorp, the ghetto, and the barrio [*Please take five seconds to quickly think of half a dozen of these urban regions…].  Regardless of which ones you are able to think of or what you label them as, cities are adjoined, unconfined to just one realm, one continent.  Cities span and connect all over the globe.

As you named your selections, (1) you probably envisioned a city that is familiar to you, perhaps you visited there and remember the route taken or method of travel used.  (2) You probably also identified major components that make a metropolis what it is- a multitude of structures, inhabitants of such structures, and a means of travel to and from these structures- all of which wreaks havoc upon the landscape and the natural order of life.  Now, [*close your eyes &] imagine a city devoid of the labyrinthine system of freeways, roads, and streets filled with autos, trucks, motorcycles, and busses.  Gone are the runways occupied by airplanes and tracks aligned with trains.  Parking lots are non-existent and unheard of.  Omitted are the sidewalks and paths utilized by pedestrians and cyclists.  Welcome, [*you may open your eyes now] you have just arrived at MOTUS (motus is not only Latin for motion or movement, it also stands for mode of transportation underlying safety).  It is the year 2501 AD.  In this imaginary, futuristic utopia, all traditional forms of travel have been replaced by teleportation pods, which VIRTUALLY eliminate road rage, road kill, and carbon monoxide pollutants.  The cessation of public phone booths has been revived, transformed from communication capsules to transportation channels.  Combustible engines have been outlawed, alternative fuel sources have been depleted, and man’s indolence has taken over.

In the absence of the ominous, elongated, concrete serpent, the ants happily keep their hill intact, the trees contently continue to grow where they stand, and mama predators gleefully trek home safely with food for their young.  Travelers joyfully get from one locale to the next instantaneously and without obstruction, the disruption of nature, or the destruction of the planet.

Yes, five hundred years from now, the municipal heart will still function despite lacking the cemented veins and arteries embedded into the terra firma and mother earth will be all the more healthier as the lifeline of travel for man is forever altered.

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Throughout human history, especially since industrialization, cities have spread like disease, literally.  Planet earth almost certainly has reached its carrying capacity for human life, yet population and consequently cities continue to grow in every direction.  If we employ Baudrillard’s metaphor of the city has a biological entity, “a loose network of individual, successive functions, a hypertrophied cell tissue proliferating in all directions,” we readily comprehend that the city is not a unified, self-sustaining, operational entity.  It is the heterogeneous drives and actions of countless (for we never truly know the exact population) individuals (or cells), solely interested in each one’s vocation or leisure, etc.  This radical self-interest, which is modern life in cities in the developed world, is, for example, traffic jams and endless lines at the supermarket or post office.  The purpose of this sketch is to demonstrate that the further development of the modern city is the antithesis of the developing human community.

All too often I think people make the mistake of merely perceiving the world as it and forget the world as it ought to be and more importantly can be.  It is impossible here (in one page) to tackle the problems of overpopulation, but we can re-envision what it means to us to be citizens of a large (and growing) city.  In the most simplistic terms this means we must decide if we want our cities to continue to grow, fostering ever more competition between individuals and companies, and yet even more individuals, or if we want to transform our cities into communities with the ultimate goal of the safety, the beauty, the unity, the success, and the harmony of the city clearly in mind.  Sudjic suggests, “the city is as much about selfishness and fear as it is about community and civic life,” I fear he is being too kind.  The city is mostly about selfishness and fear, community and civic life are relics in Plato’s mind as the form of the perfect city.  Nonetheless, I agree with Sudjic’s point that the city does “reflect man an all his potential.”  It is not man’s ability I question; it is simply his unbalanced desires.

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There is so much diversity in this city it's difficult in knowing where to
start.  Perhaps I'll describe a patch here and a patch there, which is much how the city is laid
out anyway.  Growing up I used to think that there was a downtown, an uptown,
a few houses or apartments within and between the skyscrapers, and then the
suburb.  It was a strange concept to understand that the valley was actually
a combination of several different cities, and that each city coalesced into
the next.

In the two mile radius in which I live, there are farm fields, two
cemeteries, a community college, two high schools, numerous grade schools,
two public libraries, several empty patches of desert, downtown Glendale,
numerous shopping centers, gas stations, an abandoned mall, Peoria city
limits and Phoenix city limits.  The homes range from run-down apartment
complexes and shacks to homes that can cost up to a few hundred thousand
dollars.  The streets outside the neighborhoods run up and down, parallel to
one another.  Within the neighborhoods the roads often turn in and out,
curving left or right, and sometimes dead-ending into a cul-de sac.

The valley itself is amazing.  From the downtown Phoenix area to the far
reaches of the outer suburbs there exists so many extremes.  We have the very
rich and the very poor, the ethnically diverse and the gated communities, and
the communities that don't allow children.  We have the agricultural areas
(which are quickly succumbing to housing developments) and the mountain
preserves, which coexist with the massive malls, multiplex theaters, and
magnificent high-rises.  Along side our decaying neighborhoods we are
building new communities, and on the perimeters of our cities we are
spreading ever wider into to the diminishing desert.

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    The downtown city is swollen during the day.  The people who fill that space dominate its landscape and understanding.  Mostly a transient population of white collars with confident strides down the street, while somewhere inside, desperate to stake a claim to that very space they occupy.  These people would scoff at the idea of living where they work.  They clog the streets in a rush to leave at the end of each day.  Furtive eyes may scan a face outside the car, but take great care never to connect with it.  The constant press of other people and unwanted interactions forces each to fortify their borders.  On the whole there aren’t many people at all, mostly dogs with one leg cocked.

    But there is different city at night.  A desolate contrast to the buzzing of drones, where in the same spot a sack lunch lay earlier a head now lay sleeping.  Where one can feel alone on this plane of imaginary lines, paved into roads, gone three-dimensional and slicing into the sky at right angles.  The paneled faces of skyscrapers feign eleven story mausoleums when the downtown city is silent like a cemetery.  Greeting another person at night requires deliberate purpose.  No one is slammed against the other and a simple conversation might echo across the entire city block.

    It easy to see two cities downtown.  But they just are the ends of an ethereal continuum, taken corporeal form in a single place and exposing the absurdity of one city, or two, or three.  Exposing the reality of infinite cities.  Opening up the possibility of any city imaginable and of being each one at the same time.  Yet, somewhere there is a city.  Something exists.  Some contextual anchor drags across the bottom as infinite cities churn madly in the surf overhead.
So if strolling downtown at night, absorbed in thought, do not be surprised to find yourself walking in straight lines and turning at right angles for no apparent reason.

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A large city set apart from all others.  Attracting many yet retaining only a few.  I noticed an elderly man sitting on a park bench.  In the bench adjacent to him sat a young boy.  The old man scans the courtyard.  Tall Oak trees where he and his mates climbed and jumped stood strong against man and nature.  Open fields where golden waves of grain gave way to spontaneous outbreaks of football.  The streets are new, freshly laid cement with finger writings of “Tommy loves Traci” embedded on them for all to see.  Not much traffic to contend with as people freely walk back and forth to a mom and pop family grocery.   As you enter, the slightly discolored canopy covers the entranceway, and a tall carved Indian statue greets you with cigars.  Early evening draws ones eyes to the west.  The mountains seem as if they are devouring the sunlight as nightfall begins to arrive.  Here the mountains are the protectors of all the residents of Webdromain.  Shielding the city from the neighboring city’s corruptions and fast paced lifestyles.  As for the young boy, Webdromain is far different.  As he sits on the park bench catching his breath to resume his romp across the square, he wishes how it would really be nice to have more trees to swing on.  The few trees that remained from the “park renovation efforts” could hardly be considered trees at all.  There wasn’t much time for play; as he was due to meet his friends inside the “grandest mall ever built” so the old-timers say.  He had been told by his mother that the field where that new mall stands was the proven grounds for many aspiring children; children anxious to show each other their athletic talents.  Before he proceeds to the mall, he must brave the stormy sea of automobiles that rarely stop for even red traffic signals.  He survives that round and stops in at a convenience store that bought out the old Johnson store years ago; amazed at how quickly his last dollar has gone on a simple candy bar.  As he hurries on his way, nightfall chases him.  He looks into the western skies and notices how dark the smog makes the sky seem.  Hard to see the trees on top of Mt Scott anymore, but perhaps he can see them tomorrow.  Webdromain is a city of two faces, one old and the other unknown.

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