Moral Geography: Modan 2007

It's interesting to think about a place having moral geography (Hall). The way the place and its use reflect the moral landscape of the people who use it--and the kinds of assumptions they make about themselves and others based on their use of the space. She specifically speaks of how spaces become characterized, and characterizes Takoma Park in particular as "lesbian space" which I find interesting and may be useful to my own projects.

Gal refers to fractal recursivity, or the ability of the same distinctions to be mapped onto increasingly smaller and smaller or larger and larger domains, in that, for example, there might be the public space of the main street compared with the private space of the residential streets, but then on the residential streets the public space of the street vs. the private space of the houses, and in the houses, the public space of the front porch vs. the private space of the back, etc. etc.

One thing I find interesting is the creation of the city as heterogeneous space, which, as Modan points out, is not entirely valid, given that much of Mt. Pleasant is made up of identical rowhouses built in large blocks, where really, any one person in the neighborhood is living in the same house as any number of her neighbors. Yet the suburbs are conceived as being homogeneous space in contrast to the heterogeneous space of the city--ethnically, architecturally, etc. This is an interesting thing to explore in terms of Takoma, because Takoma is a place where a rejection of the homogeneity is part of the ideologies of place that create Takoma; for example, the rejection of Subway and CVS, the feeling that CVS should not be a place that people see right away on Cedar St. when someone comes in.

An additional note: in this chapter, Modan looks at the cat-calling men in Pigeon Park in Mt. Pleasant and what they say to women who pass. I found some value in connecting this back to Marcyliena Morgan's work on Signifiying, and wonder how looking at this talk through Morgan's lens might be useful.