ambient

I watched a small protest march take place today in Mira Mesa. Mira Mesa is a suburban / office park wasteland. As I watched, I thought “how pointless.” There is no there there at which to protest.

This prompted three questions:

1. Do protests work anymore? Protests depend on disruption, and you need centrality (eg. a town square) in order to disrupt. Suburbs, by definition, are the opposite of centrality. I wonder if this is by design.

2. I sometimes wonder if the planners for the war in iraq actually counted on the insurgency to use as a training field for putting down urban protests. Without having been to Iraq, it’s hard to say. But my experience in other third-world countries does seem to support this hypothesis from an urban design perspective. Third world countries with no central infrastructure / town square are remarkably like the suburbs we live in today. Again, by design?

3. Does protest work in a country with lots of people, or does it all get lost in the static of every day life?

Not surprisingly, I’m nowhere near the first person to ask these questions. MIT has on their OpenCourseWare site a course entitled “Urban Design Politics.” In 2004, Jonathan Korman actually asked the exact same questions, and there is at least one book on the topic.