Happy Spaces & Gloomy Ones

Most modern medical setting provide a space that is the opposite of what the patient needs for recovery in fact the drab streamline sterile area may be a propagator of psychosis. Crowding can create a state of uneasiness, and also help spread the chance of both mental and physical disease. If you think of how a plague operates, it feeds off unsanitary conditions, attacks a weak, crowded, poor population, and kills with ease, because the population is in such condition which creates an impossibility of stopping the disease. Part of the historical psychological fear of crowding may even be routed in plagues that attacked our ancestors.

I think the problem of space is one of capitalism, began in the factories of the industrial revolution. People were to be streamlined. The goal was to make people into interchangeable parts. The former spaces of work, farms, small scale production centers such as smiths and bakeries, were to be replaced with mass streamlining. Open spaces were to be closed, and tightened. Factories function, by absorbing the people into a state of obscurity. So the first goal of the industrial revolution was to take the open space and close it.

Industrialism and especially its supersedent fordism are the definers of modern capitalist space. I think the train is a great metaphor. If you think of the face of the train it changes along with industrialism. It begins as a cargo hauler. Then slowly becomes a passenger vehicle, and then it enters a strange phase. If you have been on a luxury train or a European train it is an open space, made to travel comfortably, they have waiters, and drinks. The entire experience is comfort while you travel. The dark side of trains is where I was raised, the Boston trains. In Boston trains are made in a very streamline fashion. There are no nice seating arrangements, no curtains, and no beverages served, you just sit forward in a very uncomfortable seat, and look forward. The Boston train is a gloomy space. Everyone from the outlying slums and suburbs of Massachusetts commutes into the city for the day to work. No one talks to each other most sit either typing on their laptop, reading, or phoning. The idea is that they are all going to work, and will not even acknowledge each others presence.

Boston proxemics is something totally different. I met a man who had gone to the same elementary school as me the other day. We both grew up in one of Boston’s outlying slums, Brockton. We went to St. Edwards Catholic Elementary School, because most if not all of the poor white families living in the slums at that time where Irish. We struck up a conversation on the odd proxemics of Missouri, and how this strange place violates the norms we were raised by. He told me that the fact people walking by wave to you stop and say hello, really confused and unsettled him at first. We laughed over what our parents back home in Massachusetts had always advised when walking in a bad neighborhood especially. We were always told, keep your head down, hands in your pocket, and you never wanted to make eye contact with anyone it may start a fight. He told me the further west he went this action became read oppositely. He said in California when you behave like that it signifies the exact opposite, that rather than you just want to stay out of trouble, you must be up to something.