#ghettoisation

[indizombie]

Four decades ago, The Kerner Report nailed it: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what … [Black people] can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.” Black rage can only be cooled with deliberate and intentional actions that dismantle police cultures that target Black and Brown people and aggressive actions that allow access and benefits to trickle down so that the prevailing gaps in health, education, and employment disparities are filled.

Irma McClaurin, ‘Minneapolis is Burning’, Medium

[thoughtlessarse]

Lisbon's bad week: police brutality reveals Portugal's urban reality

A viral video of police violence has brought national attention to the long-ghettoised community in Bairro da Jamaica

From time to time, cars of curious people drive slowly though Bairro da Jamaica, craning their necks for a peek at the neighbourhood that’s been in the headlines across Portugal for several days now. None of them step out of their vehicles.They’re here to look at the broken glass, the smashed roof tiles and the evidence of last week’s violence. The tallest of the bairro’s self-built housing towers is now derelict, fenced off with yellow tape and awaiting demolition; the others are also scheduled to be torn down, but are still occupied for now.“Most of the residents here are just regular people: they go to school, they work, they pay their bills, they pay taxes, they contribute to society like everyone else,” says Liliana Jordão, 27, a resident of this neighbourhood on the southern outskirts of greater Lisbon. “But if Bairro da Jamaica already had a really bad reputation, this week it’s been like a zoo.

It began last week with a scrap between two residents, but it was when the police arrived that the real story kicked off: officers were captured on video beating, pushing and dragging anyone who came into their path. Filmed by local residents, the video quickly went viral on social media, spreading across the estates and neighbourhoods of the city’s peripheries, where most of Portugal’s black, Afro-descendent population resides. “When I saw the video, the way they treated those women, I actually wept,” says Jordão. “It could easily have been my mother. And then I thought to myself, no, enough is enough, I have to do something”.

[gensdezabulon]

Refuser le fumeux

      Télérama : Vous avez quand même écopé d’un étiquetage de cinéaste gay… Et obtenu la Queer Palm à Cannes, pour Laurence Anyways.

Xavier Dolan : Que de tels prix existent me dégoûte. Quel progrès y-a-t-il à décerner des récompenses aussi ghettoïsantes, aussi ostracisantes, qui clament que les films tournés par des gays sont des films gays ? On divise avec ces catégories. On fragmente le…

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[alovelyvaguery]

Ideas of collective bargaining and self-determination eventually lead to a situation where instead of class warfare, there’s ethnocide, deportation and wilful state neglect to regulate the ratio of the majority and minorities. And so everywhere we see an unmixing of populations and rise of ghettos while purveyors of commonsense guilt-assuaging manoeuvres will have us believe that tourism, instant social news media and the obsessive documentation of every place on the planet for easy consumption by interested parties somehow fosters cultural understanding and a desire for peace through the recognition of the principle that, while we may have different practises, we are, in fact, all one species, we’re all human. Living in close proximity with different people, minoritised populations—populations officially labeled minor—or ‘foreigners,’ and those of different classes and gender identities: this is the luxury of a large urban sprawl, a chance to mix freely, to resist unmixing, because a city is full of refugees of one kind at another. The rich of the world aren’t referred to as a population, they have the luxury of individuation, of vast personal holdings that enable privacy and private space to keep the clamouring multitudes at bay, to prevent mixing. This is to be our class aspiration: escaping the constraints of living with others through private ownership.

[alexcosmescu]

The spiritual history of Europe can be conceived as a constant and vain effort to expel the Jew from its soul, and finally place itself at the beginning of a culture of its own. The Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe were symbolic of this effort; the strict territorial separation of the Jews from the mass of the population created the illusion of an inner distance.

Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, p. 116

[ragdollparade]

Welcome mats, intensification and multi-lingual signage.

I found this article on non-English signage interesting, although disputable.

Overall I disagree, and feel the author is being overly reactionary. There is a comment in the thread after comparing the contemporary complaints with those of 'too many brown faces' in the 70s, which I felt was very appropo. However, from an social and urban design perspective, I do think he has (buried in the mire) a sole good point.

This is the concern that as more individuals of a specific culture gravitate to an area, partly because of local shops that cater to them, and partly because of neighbours who speak like them, dress like them and think like them, you get more shops catering to them. So far, so what? Sounds good. Until you get a critical mass - as the blogger at Tumeke! called it - at which point other cultures may feel excluded and move away, the specific culture that now inhabits that area doesn't have to go elsewhere, and the integration we all consider to be so important, so crucial, doesn't happen. In other words: you get ghettoisation.

With the drive towards intensification, we want to push the local high street as a work location, a hangout, & a shopping destination. This isn't going to work if people can't read the signs. They'll move somewhere where they can. Or stay living there, and work, shop & play elsewhere. So the threatened cultural ghettoisation is potentially a problem for intensification.

How do we get around this?

Work with the shop owners to help them understand the importance of bilingual (or even multilingual) signage. I don't buy into this notion that the lack of English signage is deliberately exclusionary in intent, I think it's partly a lack of awareness that non-Chinese/Malaysian/Korean/etc people are interested in what they have to sell, and partly a forgetfulness that others can't read it - just like English speakers assume everyone else on the planet speaks, or at least should speak, English.

Institute a cultural awareness programme in the media, to help non-Chinese/Malaysian/Korean/etc speakers feel comfortable with the languages and products, thereby reducing the sense of otherness, or alienness. Many of the middle-class liberals so disparagingly spoken of in the Tumeke! article are comfortable with the signage due to a sense of familiarity, whether it is from cuisine travel, reading or social interactions.

Lastly, but certainly not least, consider why these immigrants feel the need/desire to move into an area where they are surrounded by those 'like them'. What does this say about our own welcome mat?

Original Article

[wikipov-blog]

Immigrants: The Northern League, Tuscany Ghettoisation Plan Goes Against Integration ! http://newish.info/205722-immigrants-the-northern-league-tuscany-ghettoisation-plan-goes-against-integration

[hesspartacus-blog]

Passion for Freedom: Breaking the last taboo

The recent murders of Syrian poet and song writer Ibrahim Qashoush and Iraqi playwright and filmmaker Hadi al-Mahdi, as well as the sentence of one year in jail and 90 lashes to actress Marzieh Vafamehr, and the six-year jail sentence and 20-year filmmaking and travel ban against international award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi, amongst others, demands serious attention. In the west, whilst artists are very often free to express themselves, many nonetheless face huge amounts of pressure for addressing matters deemed ‘offensive’. Artists Sooreh Hera in the Netherlands and Lee-Anne Raymond and Demetrios Vakras in Australia come to mind, raising serious questions about tolerance of dissent, particularly when it comes to criticising religion and that which is taboo. Criticism of religion is not racist. In fact open disagreement and the freedom to criticise tradition, culture and religion are essential for social progress. Turning a blind eye to the wrongs, threats and injustices committed by religion and religious states and laws is unfair to the innumerable people who are wronged, threatened and treated unjustly. No religion should be immune to criticism. One Law for All unequivocally supports artists’ freedom of expression to address taboo issues wherever they may be and invites the public to our 2011 Passion for Freedom Art Festival showcasing a shortlist of international artists discussing the taboo through painting, drawing, sculpture, film and installation. To attend the private view on Saturday 29 October 2011, 18.00 - 21.00 hours at UNIT24 Gallery, 24 Great Guildford Street, London SE1 0FD (Transport Underground stations: Southwark), RSVP your name and mobile number to [email protected]. For more information on the week-long exhibition, visit: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/art-competition-2011/.