Skywalkers in the Forbidden City
Sitting At a computer lab at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, waiting for my computer to boot, I drifted to into a day dream of me walking around the campus quad noticing how the skywalks connect to each part of the buildings as well as the garage. I, especially in the winter time, love the fact that, for convenience, I can walk into one building and avoid the elements and cold weather because of the interconnectivity of the campus buildings.
As my computer screen finally rests at the desktop, I make my daily rounds of sites - one happens to be the new KC Free Press. I noticed this article titled, “Commuter City: Upwardly Mobile”. Seemingly, the article was written to recognize the very phenomenon I contemplated. The article however uses 11th and Main in downtown Kansas City to address it. Life is full of irony, but I found this to be a true testament to that fact!
Interestingly enough, I’ve learned about the history of downtown redevelopments that have become “upwardly mobile”. For istance, “Mike Davis” wrote a piece about the “militarization of urban space” in which he points out that the newly built parts of downtown Los Angeles have been designed to seperate classes by supplying controlled, restricted access, few public spaces, and buidlign - !!! - skywalks. He calls this portion of the new downtown LA, the “City of Quartz” in which it resembles a “forbidden city” — tantamount to the Chinese forbidden city in which royalty resided in an all inclusive enclave, thus seperating them entirely from the common folks.
It’s understand that this section of Los Angeles isn’t the most desired. The old downtown which is a melting pot of races, classes, ethnicities and orientations, was designed to welcome the public. Since it was designed to be so, it’s where the public prefers to be.
At any event, I haven’t read the entire article yet so I may be speaking on something totally different than what it addresses.
I’m wondering how this applies to Kansas City. Have our new downtown — or urban spaces in general — become militarized?
