7 - Ground Zero

Summary

On October 3, 2006 the Gallup Poll found an increase in ‘the view that terrorism or national security should be the top government priority.’

The contemporary western urban environment is a transcultural locality, understood as a self-organizing entity producing and reproducing itself through the participation of sensorial and material movements. These include the smells and tastes of different localities, such as trees, gardens, parks, and eateries; the rhythms of wind flow, flashing street signs, the pulse of traffic, the circulation of people and goods, the throb of music vibrating throughout streets and buildings; the visual clamor of color, shape, texture, scale, lighting, shade, fashion, building density, branding, and the composition of all these elements; the soul of a neighborhood, whether that be the various places of religious worship, forms of sociality, traditions and rituals, or simply the overall tone of collective behavior; and finally modes of economic production and consumption, such as the types of commercial activity defining a particular landscape. At times these characteristics collide and in other instances they proliferate through or even participate with each other. There are differences in cultural specificity, social wealth, degrees of racial and ethnic segregation, as well as population density and quality (the local population of residents and the homeless or the semi-local population of visitors and commuters).

What has just been described is neither the model of a ‘multicultural’ urban environment, whereby each cultural space is independent of the other, nor is it a homogenous entity. Rather it is best characterized by the proliferation of various localities that are not places bound by fixed relations, in the territorial sense. The urban condition just described is one of praxis. In other words, the process of urban activity is what creates distinct urban realities.