Lecture 19/20: Geographies of Morality and the Street

Question 1

What does the street symbolise?

Answer 1

Public life, with all its human contact, conflict, and tolerance
(Boddy 1992)

Question 2

What is the street celebrated as?

Answer 2

A site of political action, an environment for unmediated encounters with strangers and a place of inclusiveness (Valentine 2001)

Question 3

What are streets becoming instead of public spaces?

Answer 3

Spaces of consumption- really just for shoppers, anyone else is just getting in the way.

Question 4

The street is increasingly being shaped by

Answer 4

processes of moral regulation (and resistance).

Demands for heightened surveillance and security throw into sharp relief timeless questions about the nature of public space, how it is to be used, and under what conditions. (Mitchell, 2003)

Question 5

Moral geography is…

Answer 5

“the idea that certain people, things and practices belong in certain places… and not in others” (Creswell 2005).

Question 6

What does moral geography concern?

Answer 6

it concerns how particular symbolic and material landscapes both shape and reflect notions of ‘right/wrong’, ‘good/bad’, ‘appropriate/inappropriate’, and ‘natural/unnatural’ in relation to particular people, practices, and things.

It also concerns the ways in which certain moral boundaries are naturalized in, and through, landscapes, in the interplay of their material and representational forms and related significations.

Question 7

Historical anecdotes of moral geography

Answer 7

Women, non-white men, disabled people and LGBT people have been denied access to public space and have had to fight their way into the public sphere and to win the right to representation as part of the political public

(Mitchell, 2003)

Question 8

Often laws to create safe and ordered ‘public’ environments are about

Answer 8

the removal of unsightly ‘others’: e.g. ‘Street kids’ (Gibson, 2011).

Question 9

What are the three key ways that the street is morally regulated?

Answer 9

1. Government Laws & Policies
2. Corporate Control of Public Space
3. Attitudinal Environment

Question 10

Ways that the street is morally regulated?

1. Government Laws & Policies

Answer 10

Cities have embarked on a range of measures aimed at halting the perceived decay - designed to create safe and ordered ‘public’ environments
CCTV
The ‘Mosquito’ - sound that repels youth ‘troublemakers’
Bye-laws prohibiting certain people, groups, and behaviours.

Question 11

Ways that the street is morally regulated?

2. Corporate Control of Public Space

Answer 11

(“Pops”) Privately owned spaces– rights of the citizens change- can’t protest, to take photos, sometimes eat and drink.
Increasing tendency tomonitor our behaviour and to limit our interactions.

Question 12

Ways that the street is morally regulated?

3. Attitudinal Environment

Answer 12

Neighbourhood Watch & private security firms

Moral Panics

Question 13

Impacts of Moral Policing

Answer 13

Hoodies and Youth- potrayed in such a way so might as well carry on

Question 14

Impacts of Moral panics

Answer 14

“other” as a threat to decent (i.e., white, Christian and heterosexual) society.
Connections are made between one event and the wider malaise of society as a whole (street = dangerous)
Legitimisation of unsafe spaces- women told unsafe on own.

Question 15

Impacts on People: Self-regulation

Time-space avoidance strategies

Answer 15

Avoiding going out at night after a particular time, using a car or taxi to avoid walking through particular places

Question 16

Critiques of Moral Policing

Answer 16

Academic community argue increase in monitoring/policing is killing the democratic mix and vitality of the streets = the end of truly ‘public’ space.
(Valentine, 2001)

Question 17

Excluded groups have taken to the streets in order to press their claims for their rights. The street has therefore become…

Answer 17

an important organizing ground and space where different causes can be seen and heard by others (Mitchell 1996)

Question 18

Forms of Resistance shaping the street

Answer 18

1. Direct Action- often a blurring of nonviolent and violent protest exists
2. Transgression- Transgressing Boundaries = resisting corporate control & public codes
3. Indirect Resistance- subtle, mundane, individual, and hidden and takes place as part of the practices of everyday life.