The various built environment professions (architecture, town planning, landscape architecture, and other spatial practices) have been making satirical jokes about Trump's proposed wall. I am not an exception. I made jokes on Facebook about the Trump Wall needing to be mixed-use, and should include public consultation for it to be publicly liked and liveable. I made jokes about how its massing should be articulated to break down its expansive verticality and horizontality in order to be more human-scale and to offer unobstructed views of the glorious desert. I made jokes about how its ground-plane should have plazas and landscaping that reflects the natural environment and offer moments of respite.
Why is it so easy to make jokes about applying these common "rules of thumb" of urban design to Trump's Wall? Why is it so much harder for many of us to actually critically ask why such extreme antemurale attitudes exist? Is it because those urban design rules of thumb are very much drawing from the same defensive mentality as Trump's Wall? For instance, mixed-use is never truly about exchange; it is simply placing two uses that are tolerable to each other side by side. Furthermore, what do we mean by activated public spaces? Who do planners and architects have in mind as the audience of these spaces? As such, do the designs explicitly and/or implicitly seek to exclude the Others? The notion that we can design away crime is to assume we need to use design as a mechanism to deter the arrival of the Others.
Maybe the bigly tremendous wall is in some ways the out of proportion manifestation of all those beloved rules of thumb for "good" urbanism.
Why is it so easy to make jokes about applying these common "rules of thumb" of urban design to Trump's Wall? Why is it so much harder for many of us to actually critically ask why such extreme antemurale attitudes exist? Is it because those urban design rules of thumb are very much drawing from the same defensive mentality as Trump's Wall? For instance, mixed-use is never truly about exchange; it is simply placing two uses that are tolerable to each other side by side. Furthermore, what do we mean by activated public spaces? Who do planners and architects have in mind as the audience of these spaces? As such, do the designs explicitly and/or implicitly seek to exclude the Others? The notion that we can design away crime is to assume we need to use design as a mechanism to deter the arrival of the Others.
Maybe the bigly tremendous wall is in some ways the out of proportion manifestation of all those beloved rules of thumb for "good" urbanism.
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