again, trying for a retro poster thing, didnt really happen

a thought I had while making this was:

It's interesting how different the connotations of the words home and house are.

trying to make old looking photos, didnt really work

22 month old surfer

student section for game against cornell

can you spot me?

"This young man was encouraging passersby to join the "American Society for the Protection of Tradition, Family, and Property"—presumably in that order—a Catholic lay organization (heh) whose chief campaign right now is to stop the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Because what screams, "I'm not gay!" like a red cape?"

Proposal for my Final Project for Urban Studies

For my urban studies class the final project is to do a research project and put it into blog form. This is my topic proposal for the project:

I want my final project to be a study of a specific city that exemplifies the idea that housing should not be the primary objective of developmental projects. Instead, strong and widespread economic growth should be the focus, and with the success of this goal, better housing will follow naturally.

There is a huge focus on providing the people in the slums with better housing, but these texts never address the question of, “if we were to succeed in putting everyone in “better” housing, where would we go from there?” The act of putting someone in a different location or inside a different structure does not necessarily have an effect on their job, their income, their education, their ability to move throughout the city, their political influence, or their potential for socio-economic mobility. New housing has a massive financial cost to the provider (presumably the government) yet it fails to address the root causes for why the poor need these new assistance in the first place.

Public housing sometimes starts dilapidated but even when it starts in good condition there is little political or economic incentive to keep the housing in good conditions. In addition, even if the physical structure is well built, the housing may not meet the most important needs of the people, from the people’s perspective. This disparity between the perceived needs and the actual needs seems to be related to the hierarchy that Davis describes among NGOs.

So far a few cities stand out as possible subjects for the project. In Bangkok, Davis reported that the poor actively preferred their slums to public housing blocks. In Jakarta, the poor complained that the public housing didn’t meet their needs because there was no access to workshop space. Finally, in Lagos there is evidence of the creative energy of the slums and their restrictions because of a lack of infrastructure. Thus far I don’t know enough about these cities to say if they are a good match, so as the semester continues I will continue looking into these cities and keep an eye out for better potential matches.

how schools kill creativity