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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Deirdre Mask
Read between
January 1 - January 20, 2021
kōban, small buildings staffed with police officers familiar with the area and armed with detailed maps and thick directories.
the Japanese seemed to find the block a useful way to organize space
And kanji are not written on lines. Instead, Emiko told Barrie how in Japan their paper did not have lines but dozens of square boxes.
differences in writing systems with the ways Westerners and the Japanese see their cities.
In Tokyo, Barthes wrote fondly, you must “orient yourself not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience.”
connecting language to the way we think about space,
despite the push for globalization, Korean culture on the whole remains deeply nationalistic.
Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate.
revolutionary passion for inventive naming extended to the streets.
To name something is to assert power over it;
90 percent of children in Northern Ireland still go to schools segregated by religion.
The street signs tracked the lives and movements of the Jewish people in Germany.
As Jewish street names changed, the map of where Jewish people were free to travel changed as well.
Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for virtually anything at all. The state can literally put words in your mouth.
nation’s reckoning with its Nazi past and the German division during the Cold War.
built a separate town for the black residents, one he called Liberia, a city black people could run themselves.
In Liberia, three streets named to honor cities with robust black communities—Louisville, Macon, and Savannah—were renamed after Confederate generals
69 percent of the white Union troops survived—compared with only 35 percent of the black soldiers.
America seemed to want to celebrate the Confederacy even though the Confederates had fought to destroy America itself.
But as the great changes of the twentieth century seemed to speed up history, and as memory became more removed from everyday experience, we began to feel a powerful urge to hold memories not just in our minds but in specific things and places—like monuments and street names.
We salt away our memories, bronze them in parks, and tattoo them on street signs to try to force our future societies to be more like our past ones.
The growth of the Civil War monuments peaked twice: first, in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow laws were being made, and then again in the 1950s and ’60s when the laws were being challenged. “These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy,”
For others, keeping the Civil War history on the signs was a way of clinging to a heritage they believed was romantic—it was part of their collective memory, a heritage they felt they could admire while still rejecting the evils of slavery.
name change certainly doesn’t change character. But it might signal a changing memory.
most Confederate-named streets and most streets honoring Martin Luther King in the South, where the majority of the nation’s black people still live.
MLK streets quickly became associated with black communities.
Melvin’s vision for MLK Drive. “MLK stands for Materials, Labor, Knowledge,”
excluding African Americans from low-interest loans
Black neighborhoods were demolished as part of a policy of “urban renewal.”
we have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement.”
For many people, a street named after Martin Luther King can only be a black street. And for them, a black street will always be a bad street.
“racist nostalgia.”
‘apartheid,’ which will give the various races the opportunity of lifting themselves on the basis of what is their own.” Racism was repackaged as empowerment.
“it is difficult for them to accept that they aren’t in power—if we give up the street names now, what’s going to be next?
many believe that the revolution in South Africa has barely begun. Mandela, long lionized as a peacemaker around the world, is now criticized for giving too much away.
If Mandela didn’t want to change names because he didn’t want to make it too obvious a revolution had happened—well, in that respect, he might have succeeded too well.
key to success is location, location, location,”
New Yorkers had already been bullshitting street names for more than a hundred years.
Street names were an early tool for gentrification.
It’s no accident that Central Park West is an expensive address; the name was specifically chosen to be expensive.
In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive.
vanity address program
An apartment on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue can cost 5 to 10 percent more than an equivalent property on nearby cross streets.
In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.”
even the road name you choose can make a difference to how much you can expect to pay when finding a property.”
the best marketing tool of all was an address.
By definition, homeless people don’t have homes. But an address is not a home. An address, today, is an identity;
every job application asked for an address even though employers would likely contact applicants by phone or email.
Only about a tenth were chronically homeless.
the postal service doesn’t offer what the homeless really need—a way to pass as not homeless.
