Sleep Now....

I really wanted to get to 5000 words tonight. But I'm stopping at 4509, which includes my random notes at the bottom of the document, so really it's more like 3600. This thing is due Monday at 5, but I also have to get a 10 minute presentation done which I'm giving on Monday during my 3 o' clock class, so I really need to get this thing done tomorrow.

I'm still going to go out for Chinese with restoman, but other than that, it's going to be another day of school stuff. Hopefully with more solid concentration than I've had the last couple of days. Though I have to admit, taking a little bit of a break in general has been good for me.

The Signpost Forest

As I was looking at various highways in Google Earth last night, I got distracted. I followed highways north out of Vancouver toward Alaska, marveling at the vast swaths of largely uninhabited land. I zoomed in on a small town in the Yukon, at random, and switched to street view in the hope of finding the place's name. By dumb luck, in the 1,200-plus miles between BC and Alaska, I was across the street from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_Post_Forest

Leave it to me to home in like a laser on kitschy tourist stuff in the middle of the wilderness. And now, I so badly want to go visit.

It would be wonderful, if I were independently wealthy, to try bicycling the Alaska Highway.

I am *so* looking forward to a road trip in a few days!

Working on Finishing up this Paper

A quote from Ken Jackson, publisher of local news site Urban CNY, that's going in near the end of my paper about social justice and highway removal. After saying that the loudest voices for removal belong to those who portray the highway as a physical barrier dividing the city, he writes:

The city is not divided by a highway, Syracuse is divided by poverty. You can take down the highway, replace it with a yellow brick road, mount a white Unicorn and add a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Syracuse’s staggering poverty levels are still here."

Which I think gets at a certain underlying spatial utopian thinking in all these plans. I think it's great to get rid of these highways. They promote unsustainable transportation methods, they blight their surroundings, and they're ugly. But as David Harvey expresses in Possible Urban Worlds, spatial form doesn't magically fix broken social processes. The two produce each other, and addressing one in isolation will always fall short. And sadly, a completely reimagined spatial form is still going to possess the flaws inculcated into it by the flawed social processes that imagine and implement it.

Working through this has led me to think that, in some ways, talking specifically about highway removal is missing the point. (Though that would be equally true for discussions of any particular kind of reimagining of urban forms.) Instead, these issues of justice are dependent on, and symptomatic of, unjust social processes that regressively redistribute wealth away from the poor by disconnecting use value from exchange value. I come back to Harvey's argument in his early 1970s essay on ghetto formation; the only way to really eliminate conditions of inequality is make the conditions that give rise to it no longer pertain. And he (and others) been working on that for 40 years, yet here we are.

I wasn't sure where I was actually going when I started this paper. It's not the happiest place to end up. But it makes sense I suppose. I do think there's some real potential for making the urban environment better for a lot of people. But some of those people are the currently wealthy and privileged, and its hard to say how many of them are the marginalized and disadvantaged that, under most concepts of justice, ought to be receiving the greatest level of benefit.

Snuggles!

It occurs to me the that one argument for the best size to be, as a person, may be dead center at population mean. That would provide an equal number of people to feel encompassed and protected by when snuggling and to be able to encompass and make feel protected. Admittedly those feelings aren't entirely about relative size, but it can be an appealing part of it.

I should find people to snuggle here once I'm back from the break. That would be good for me. It's a shame there are no cuddle party organizers in the area.