Cities and Borders
I mentioned Adam Langer’s Crossing California in a previous post. One of the many interesting things about that book is that it’s central theme is a street – California Avenue in Chicago – that was a border for a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a familiar kind of border – anybody who has lived in a city (or in suburbs, or in rural areas) will recognize a variety of borders that have nothing to do with political boundaries. If you talk to people, they can usually point to a line (sometimes corresponding to a street, an overpass, or the clichéd railroad track) that separates rich from poor, or race from race, educated from non, safe from un. Part of the specialized knowledge of place is to understand the shifting nature of these borders (they may emerge only at night, for example. They may even be marked by, for example, gang symbols or neighborhood watch signs).
That much everybody knows. So why am I blogging about it?
What do I have to add? Well, the way the borders change – they are contingent on collections of impressions, shifting landscapes of shops, schools, apartments, transportation. We recognize that the borders of daily life are impermanent, however meaningful they may be in any moment.
Is that part of the reason for the ever-recurring immigration debate in America? We all know that a border is a fake thing, and thus we pour money into policing, wall-building, legislation, caricatures of immigrants in order to make this fake thing seem real, urgent, permanent, safe. When really no border can be any of those things.
I know that the observation doesn’t solve the problem, or even address what most consider to be the issues, but over and over in the immigration debate my sense is that the actual lives of immigrants are totally marginal to the fears that people have about losing jobs, low wages, security, a breakdown of established rules. Like terrorism, immigration is a debate about our own neuroses. I just wish we once again had political elites willing to insist that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Instead, we get “FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!” Which in turn makes me rather afraid, just not about immigration or terrorism.
4 Responses to “Cities and Borders”
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I don’t know dude, in the bigger sense, we’re still owned by the geology. The U.S. is separated from Mexico, over a large expanse, by a big river. (The States from Canada is sketchy of course, the 49th parallel being pretty arbitrary, but safe to say that it’s separated by a wilderness in most places, and bunch of lakes where there’s civilization.) The American coasts are vastly different than its interior, and it’s no coincidence.
I think there are still natural boundaries on the microscale (city size, and maybe neighborhood size), but a lot of perceived ones too, and how we populate the spaces in between is sometimes arbitrary and sometimes not. Keeping out the hoi polloi seems to be the privelege of the more naturally closed communities (think Manhattan maybe, or Vancouver).
I think a lot of Americans would like to keep out what’s on either side of the mountain ranges as much as to keep out what’s south of teh Rio Grande. Isn’t that preserving that aesthetic what ultimately sells the farm bills? I think their sense of exclusivity, propped up for years now, feels threatened.
I agree with your closing paragraph.
Well, I was admittedly just in Berlin, where the appearance and disappearance of demarcation has been particularly stark and arbitrary. But even in your examples, the borders are as much perceived as geologic. Rivers, after all, can just as easily be viewed as uniting geographic regions — rivers connect. Why should the Mississippi and Ohio rivers be arteries and the Rio Grande a border? And of course, as soon as you get to Arizona and New Mexico it’s imperial history that’s far more dominant than any distinguishing features of geography.
I suspect the wilderness of the U.S. Canada border is a product of politics, or of imagination. I mean, in Idaho and Washington the wilderness drifts well into the state. Manhattan as exclusive citadel is an extremely recent phenomenon (a process still going on) , and even so if you mapped New York by income you’d find Manhattan closely connected to Riverdale and parts of Brooklyn. There’s no real reason to view the socio-economic changes happening in NYC as converging on the island.
I don’t quite get the point about coasts and interior. But at any rate I agree that physical geography has an effect on our lives, but the effect is really complicated, and can’t be reduced to a line (California is coast, Nevada interior — but would it matter if the border between the two were ten miles in either direction?).
Good to see you, by the way. I’m doing most of my blog reading via Google Reader nowadays, which means I read you and hipparchia and Claude and others more often, but comment less often. I’m loving your diplomacy posts!
Well, I think those things guide the eye at the very least, and at the big scale do things like govern the climate and the fertility. Important in the big picture way. Definitely less so on the neighborhood scale. And we can draw lines too. And fill them in any old way.
(Lots of wilderness in upstate Maine and New Hampshire too. It’s where I’d hide if I liked civilization a little less.)
I’m glad anyone reads that. Between diplomacy and quiblit, I think I inadvertantly killed my own blog. (Maybe everyone is using a meta reader thingie. Yeah, that’s it.) Nice to see you writing stuff too. A break in the busy?
K
Nobody reads me. You, Dawn, sometimes Claude, twiffer, and bright. That’s really about it. I don’t know if I have more time, but I think I’m more uptight about job stuff and am trying to ignore my anxieties rather than do something productive. Also — committed to shorter posts.