Does a good social mix create greater security for urban residents?

This episode we're talking mixité or diversity. How does it affect public space socially and politically in the Parisian region.

The title of the project, Here There Be Dragons, comes from a medieval mapping convention, where cartographers would draw sea monsters and demons over unexplored land or dangerous territories accompanied by the phrase hic sunt dracones, here be dragons. It is a method of defining the borders of a world or territory by uncertainty and fear. Through my own experiences with exploring cities, I came to believe that this system of world defining is fairly common. I wanted to investigate the idea that residents of cities negotiate their identities through public space and define the boundaries of their cities by what is feared or uncertain.

For our final episode, we’ll be picking up where the Utopia episode left off. How do residents take ownership of their cities?

A question that I asked each resident was where their personal city center was, where was the heart of the city to them. And how did they come to feel that way? This episode we’re exploring the many different Parises that exist for its residents. Some of them reached to the city’s past for the answers, some reach into their own pasts, while still others saw the city’s heart in Paris’s future.

In this episode I’ll also be responding to some listener questions about themes from past episodes and how we went about certain aspects of the show. Look for that at the end of the episode.

It will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many plans for urban utopias. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more. Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on. But one person’s utopia can be another person’s nightmare depending on who you talk to.

In this episode we’ll be diving into the utopias scattered throughout Paris in the 20th century. Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out?

This episode will focus not just on the identities of people but of places. We’ll be talking about the way that Paris is divided through years of history, politics and design. Cities have significant physical and psychic borders that create local bias and affinities. Paris is no different.

Last episode we talked about “French hipsters” or bobos and the anxiety about being perceived as one. This episode we’ll be expanding our ideas about how people want to be perceived in public space. The stereotype of Parisians being stylish and glamorous trendsetters is nothing new. But the more you get to know the city the more you see how style can be contentious. It often dances along the fault lines of gender, class, religion, race, and sexuality. How people dress is directly influenced by how they want to be treated in public space.

Bobo means bourgeois-bohème; a left leaning, culture loving elite. Kind of the French version of the hipster. Someone of or joining a more comfortable class who likes to dabble in the cultural spaces of the working class and/or ethnic groups. The bobo like the hipster is the boogieman of gentrification. No one wants to be bobo and yet we see them everywhere. And with their presence goes the neighborhoods we knew. This episode will be dispatches from and on the edge of Boboland.

This episode we’re going to look at the question of communitarianism, residents separating or isolating into communities.

The decision of whether to live in a community that reflects only you or a community that reflects the demographics of the whole nation is about more than just simple comfort. We’re going to talk about many different types of communities in this episode and why residents choose to embrace or reject them.

Does a good social mix create greater security for urban residents?

This episode we're talking mixité or diversity. How does it affect public space socially and politically in the Parisian region.

Welcome back! This is the first episode of Here There Be Dragons season 2. This season we're listening to Parisians tell their stories of fear and identity in the city of lights.

You might remember the horrifying news we’ve heard from Paris as terrorist attacks rocked the city. Three attacks in the past two years. The one on November 13th 2015 left 130 people dead and 413 injured. These attacks lead to increased media attention and speculation about whether France’s capital was safe, what to do from there and who to blame.

In this episode we'll hear Parisians talking about how the attacks affected them and how they see their safety in the city in their wake.

The title of the project comes from the medieval mapping technique of drawing dragons and sea monsters over unexplored or dangerous territories. Although we now find these maps to be historic figments of a medieval imagination, many of us carry these same maps around in our heads. We negotiate our identities through space, pre-emptively planning escapes and defenses should the city square off against us. But as the stories from each episode show us, monsters can also disappear as we unlearn fear and access new spaces. Or, the monsters remain and we navigate these spaces anyway.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Despite being the most diverse borough in the city, in terms of race and income, for the New Yorkers I spoke with, the Bronx stood out as the most dangerous part of the city. But as we’ve seen in previous episodes, danger is a complicated emotion, ranging from fear of violence to feeling unwelcome. In this episode, the Bronx natives I spoke with work to navigate their own identities through their borough’s reputation. Their feelings towards the Bronx reflect some of the many ways that navigating our cities force us to confront who we are.

Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the city and one of the most talked about. For some New Yorkers it represents a Mecca of black American culture and history while for others it is a dangerous neighborhood with a reputation for violence. Harlem’s powerful history makes it an icon for blackness and black culture. Our feelings towards the neighborhood, inherited or learned, are also mixed with our feelings towards blackness.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Public housing, the projects, have a reputation in New York, even to people who’ve never been to the city. They are at once a low-income family’s best housing resource and places feared for crime and violence. Rumors of crime and incidents of violence make us forget that they are also homes, that they also have history that is deeply tied to city. This side of the projects is unfamiliar to even native New Yorker who often see the buildings for their broken windows and not the histories that live within them.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Neighborhoods that see a rapid increase of wealthy tenants can become foreign to those who know its history. Displacement of long term residents and erasure of cultural landmarks can make these changes feel like a loss or even a theft. Just as violence in the first episode steals our feelings of familiarity, gentrification can do the same thing, making once familiar neighborhoods and our place in them seem strange to us.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Violence, the experience of it, the threat of it, the rumor of it has a tendency to make even the most familiar places foreign to us. It complicates our relationship with the city and allows fear to lurk in the back of our minds. In the episode below we’ll hear stories of New Yorkers confronting and anticipating the violence they've experienced in their city.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio