Freedom in the City and everywhere else

Recently, I asked a friend of mine who lived in New York for a year what were some of the most interesting things she experienced while living in such a big city. I’ve heard her talk about a few things related to her experiences in New York, and also when she lived in Italy for a while, but I wanted to know specifically about something she found really unique about city life.

She mentioned that there were street artists everywhere, especially in Central Park, and it was very lively and entertaining. People-watching was fun, but some things could also be very weird and awkward. For example, she told me was about a time when she was sitting by herself at Central Park. She was drawing dresses in her sketchbook when a lady came up to her and started a conversation about her drawings. The lady told her she wrote children’s books and was dying to find an illustrator. Somehow these books dealt with fashion. So, my friend politely talked with her and exchanged email addresses, but when she received an email from the lady explaining whatever plans she had for the books, it made absolutely no sense. Convenient thing about New York is she never had much chance of running into that lady again, so the solution was super easy—the delete button. This is something I think I would really appreciate about being in a big city.

My friend also told me that the atmosphere in Rome, Italy was very similar to New York. People were always out and about, selling things, advertising things, doing street performances and all sorts of other fun things for passersby. I’ve never been to New York, so I only have a mental picture of what this would be like, and my imagination leans toward something like an eclectic version of Disney World. I really want to learn more about the different kinds of street artists and how they specifically contribute to the big city life picture.

I’m still learning and searching for more information, but I did stumble upon this particular article about street performers and “Quiet Zones”: http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/features/2011/may/30/street-performers-upset-central-park-quiet-zones/.

The article basically describes the interference of the enforcement of a new quiet zone with a man’s traditional music performances at the Bethesda Fountain and Strawberry Fields at Central Park every weekend.

Though I’m not sure if I would “side” with the musician, I want to understand his mentality more. It seems that small towns tend to get the reputation for being too traditional and set in their ways, but I really wonder about the city folks. Maybe city people don’t like change so much after all either, just in a different way. The city seems to make people feel entitled to freedom. Freedom of speech is a fundamental part of Boyd’s argument in the article, for example. Maybe what people want everywhere is really all the same, but it shows in different ways because our different cultural backgrounds shape us into having different values and sets of belief, which is something we sort of talked about in class.

People like to be able to do the things that they feel define themselves, whether they are city dwellers or not, and they want to  do these things freely and comfortably, just as the lady at Central Park felt comfortable sharing her passion for children’s books with my friend.

In that regard, it just makes sense that the musician who is upset about the placement of quiet zones in his favorite stage location seems oddly similar to a farmer who is upset when his land taken away by the government for industrial expansion purposes. People just don’t like being bossed around, but maybe we just see that more clearly through situations which involve or in some way embody the city life for whatever reasons.

Cities and Natural Disasters

Cities are constantly in a state of change. One of the inevitable parts of many changes is the fact that they cannot be controlled or predicted. A literal example of this type of change is the ever present threat of natural disasters. This specific type of change occurred this past Sunday (May 20,2012) in the beautiful historic city of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region when a 6.0 magnitude earthquake rattled the cobblestone streets.

Italy is a romantic place full of differing flavors and accents in every city. Preserving these unique accents that combined make Italy the beautiful hotbed for culture that it is, is necessary. But, when disaster strikes such as this dreadfully recent earthquake, what can one do? How Italy’s Emilia-Romagna and other cities around the world react proves an import character trait of cities as a whole.

In Finale Emilia-Romagna the destruction was painful and very visible. According to Mark Byrnes (a writer for www.theatlanticcities.com) “The earthquake left behind an estimated €200 million in damages to the local agricultural and livestock industries and as many as 4,000 people homeless.” The earthquake also left seven dead in it’s wake.

The pictures and Mark Byrnes article can be found on this link and show the extend of the damage: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/05/when-earthquake-meets-truly-old-buildings/2062/

I found this tragic tale from out twitter Urban Studies List page.

As you can see, it is absolutely catastrophic and has destroyed not only buildings and land many centuries old, but it murdered humans as well. The first picture shows a majestic clock tower that was split in half. The next is the Town Hall building with gaping wounds in its walls. The next is a damaged church that was pretty much leveled to the ground, as all that is left is a beautiful wooden door, some dusty white columns, and scratched red walls. The next photo shows the mangled remains of a ceramics factory that is beyond hope, followed by various pictures of members of the community picking up the mess that the Earth’s tremors left behind.

I can’t help but be reminded of not much more than a year ago when our neighboring city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama was met with another unexpected agent of change in the form of a deadly tornado. The tornado ripped the campus and people’s lives apart just like the earthquake in Italy did.

Natural disasters are anything but natural and there is no guaranteed way to predict them or ensure safety from them, but they are an element that always has and always will affect cities. So what does that mean?

I do not believe it means it is futile to avoid them and therefore all hope is lost, but rather looking at what a city does after such an event tells a lot about it. Natural disasters unite cities as they are wholly interdependent and therefore must work together to rebuild and re-grow.

There is an obvious common trait in all the pictures of the Italy earthquake that have people amidst the rubble. They are all working, be it individually or with others, for a common goal: to rebuild their home, their city. And that is why cities will always survive.