In "Suburban Nation", Duany (et all) describe the decline of the mixed income community across America. Many suburban zoning laws prevent these types of communities from emerging, and many home owners associations, afraid of the potential adverse affect on property value, want to keep the poor as far away as possible. This has created a kind of economic apartheid (which often correlates with racial divisions in frightening ways). In the past, economic mobility, up or down, didn't necessarily mean uprooting yourself from your neighborhood. Nowadays, losing your job usually means leaving town altogether. The poor, unless we ourselves are forced to join their ranks, tend to remain safely hidden from view.
The fact that we don't interact with the needy within our own communities, and hence are not capable of helping them directly, creates a void in our moral lives. Looking for ways to satisfy our basic psychological need to help others, we often create imaginary portraits of those we are attempting to aid. And when the reality fails to match these portraits, we become unsettled by the cognitive dissonance and change the channel. The increasingly popular industry known as "voluntourism" is an important symptom of our physical separation. NGO's and aid organizations are scrambling to pander to our perceptions of what the poor should look like, which frequently include romanticizations of poverty.
It's important to be a part of aiding communities far from home, and internationally. But it's also important to create spaces where people, as they experience upward mobility, retain the opportunity to contribute to the lives of their less fortunate neighbors. Separation reinforces the idea in our minds that the poor are a problem, instead of the reality that the poor can be our neighbors, friends and family. Promoting real, mixed income neighborhoods as an alternative to income stratified sprawl is an important part of the solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment