Contact

I take for granted the fact that I don’t talk to anyone on the street. Not so much take for granted, necessarily, but perhaps take as given, that I don’t talk to anyone on the street. Maybe if I run into a friend or colleague, but just as likely we both barely realize the other one is there, or are unsure how to enter the interaction, and simply bring it up the next time we see each other.

I dare not assert my experiences as universal, because it would be arrogant. What I would suggest instead, even if it’s just playing with words a bit, is that I am but one member of a vast society, and so it is unlikely that many of my experiences and interactions are truly unique or unusual.

The other day, I finally got around to the final few pages of Samuel R. Delaney’s incredible Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The book, for the unaware, is split into two: the first is an essay about Delaney’s experiences in the Times Square he knows: the Times Square before its sanitized gentrification, when it was full of theaters and little shops and bars and, most importantly, sex. Not hedonistic, Godless, lawless sex, but a world of interactions and social mores which revolved around and mediated sexual interactions in a public sphere.

The second is more of a treatise on, well, a number of things. On the redevelopment of Times Square, on metaphysical and ontological arguments of sexuality and society, but most interestingly, on contact. A term lifted from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but a much less discussed aspect of the book.

Delaney describes contact as a number of things, but most importantly as interaction that happens across classes and in largely mundane ways and places. They might pay off only in the pleasure of having a casual conversation, or, as Delaney points out; sometimes in ways that we would often expect through networking: the much more deliberate and intraclass interactions. I have an upper-middle class background, I spent years in private school (story for another time), and I went to college and currently pursue a masters degree. These are social mechanisms which are produced and reproduced through networking. Often, colleagues point out that the most value-producing part of higher education are not the skills or ideas themselves, but positioning yourself among this class.

What he points out, and what I realize as a planner, is that the reforming of space in America is oriented away from contact and towards networking. Delaney mentions (p.125), and I agree, that it is a fundamental aspect of city life. Not just an unpleasant necessity, but the very core of what makes cities wonderful. The ways in which he observed and benefited from contact, in Times Square and elsewhere, were unplanned and unforced, and, in my view, uncapitalizable.

The redevelopment of Times Square sought to smooth over the perceived ugliness of the neighborhood, and to create a space of capital dominance that barely acknowledges its history. Only one or two of the theaters in the neighborhood were maintained, and none of the shops. Not that the bright marquees of adult theaters and shops were necessarily beautiful, but that the world they facilitated was necessary and beautiful in its own right.

I realize as a planner that we so rarely acknowledge the influence of capital on urban space and urban form. I have anecdotal theories as to why: acknowledging the realities of capitalism is often abstract and the domain of the most annoying person in the room. Planners are often well-intended, technocratic, and largely liberal (i.e. they believe in the possibility of reforming within existing systems). To say that the way a mixed-use development with public green space does not facilitate contact is to be a raincloud, a complainer, someone who doesn’t believe in as good as we can do right now. Samuel Stein, in his book Capital City, outlines the fundamental contradiction planners face in developing the social values they espouse versus the capital imperatives that drive the American economy and urban space.

I’m having a little bit of trouble threading the needle of this connection, but I hope that it is a provocative one. I’m feeling torn between needing to approach this with the depth and thoroughness of an academic essay, and the reprieve of writing this as a neat little blog post to get me out of a funk. Maybe it’s worth exploring in that level of detail eventually.

If there’s anything to take away from this, approach your walk down the street, around the store, with a critical mind. What about the space feels conducive to contact? When do you actually experience those moments? What is the difference between newer and older planned spaces in terms of feeling like people of all classes and kinds are welcome?

Both of these songs have been stuck in my head for a few days.

The LCS series started a few days ago. God do I hope the Brewers find a way past the Dodgers.