“The city is…something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences – streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones…something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices…the city is…a state of mind.”
-Robert Park, 1916
Images of young black men and women smashing windows of crowded sports bars and aggressively claiming city spaces in downtown Baltimore’s entertainment green zones can be simultaneously disturbing and inspiring. They invoke in many of us thoughts of ourselves or our loved ones in danger; for some in the media they conjure fears of twenty-first century “race wars” like those scattered across the twentieth century; at minimum they give visual aid to pundits wishing to transfigure protesters into hordes of unruly black criminals and refocus the story on black violence, away from the death of Freddie Gray. As a result there has been a constant volley in the news and social media about the meanings of the protests, representations of the protesters, and the efficacy of violence, looting, police confrontations and street occupations.
But the protesters are doing something very important that is not being discussed. By occupying streets, destroying windows, buildings and vehicles, and by confronting police officers in the very contested spaces in which state sanctioned violence takes place, black residents of Baltimore are altering their cognitive map of the city and bursting out of the psychological and physical boundaries that criss cross the urban landscape. Urbanist Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, argued that urbanites understood their city in predetermined ways and composed “mental maps” of the spaces they lived in using five factors: 1) walkways and streets, 2) districts and neighborhoods, 3) nodes or points of activity like street corners, 4) landmarks and lastly (5) edges and boundaries between spaces.
Lynch’s work focused on three cities; Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles. In each of these cities he found that the urban historical geography shaped people’s perception of the city’s spaces, and controlled the contours of the cognitive map. Living in great sprawl and primarily traversing space using automobiles on wide highways, Los Angeles residents often had hazy mental maps of their city. In contrast, public transportation using Boston residents knew intimately the paths, nodes, landmarks, districts, and edges of their metropolitan area. However, these maps are contingent upon one’s location, social and economic status, experience of the city, and too often, race. Cultural, spatial, class and racial differences have a part in determining the construction of one’s cognitive map of the city and the protesters in Baltimore are in the process of reshaping their cognition of the city, particularly in respect to boundaries.
Baltimore’s black residents know that their city has been turned inside out over the past few decades. That the money, the middle class, and the infrastructure have fled to the suburbs and that large swaths of the remaining urban environment is in distress. They know that their communities in distress are encircled by physical, economic, and psychological boundaries zealously and militarily patrolled by local police. The same sort of patrolling that killed Freddie Gray, Kajieme Powell, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo and countless other African American men and women. This is not news. That this policing protects multiple green zones across Baltimore is also not a newsflash. Green zones like Charles Village, Harbor East, and the Inner Harbor, described by the Urban Land Institute as the “model for post-industrial waterfront redevelopment around the world” in 2009. The black residents of Baltimore are, and have been, aware of these boundaries.
Whatever one may feel about images of young black men and women smashing windows of crowded sports bars and aggressively claiming city spaces, it is crucial to also understand the very humanness of resisting complete circumscription. Whatever one may think of looting, it is critical to realize the profundity of inequality in Baltimore and many other American cities, the depth of unemployment, the militancy of police enforcement and the thoroughness of encirclement that black communities experience.
And whatever one may think about the violence and destruction happening in Baltimore there is one thing that is undeniable. The protesters are very conspicuously crossing these boundaries, reconstructing their cognitive maps of the city that they live in, and confronting the police, the very people who define, maintain and patrol these divisions. And they are using their newfound international stage in constructive and provocative ways to discuss urban divisions.
-D.J. Flowe
D.J. Flowe 
Reblogged this on Tangents USA and commented:
A very interesting article about the cultural implications of the Baltimore protests.
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