Thanks Don and Martin for jogging my memory -- a point i missed made in
conversation was when the mayor wanted to go with the full padding rule even
though the over-18-helmet-only rule would have covered the city from litigation
-- her words were "we want to have something special and I think we want to go
beyond what is necessary".
It IS interesting that except for tennis courts, skateboarding is the only
recreation area in the city that has an 8 ft chain link fence, and since there
is no need to keep in bouncing balls, as in tennis, there is a little
explanation due. The park is located behind the middle school, and in the
past, in this neighborhood, people have used our street to get easy access to
the ball fields that are also behind the school. Often folks would drink
beer, and would leave the bottles/cans on the side of the road, and would speed
on the street after their game. In addition, there was concern expressed about
a bend in the street also being used as a dropoff/pick-up point for kids before
and after school. The traffic issue was exacerbated by renovations at the high
school (on the next block behind my house) which put two additional grades of
students at the middle school. Concerns by the neighborhood had already forced
the city to put up signs indicating no parking allowed adjacent to the ball
fields during school hours.
So there was a lot of concern about the increase in traffic that the skatepark
would bring. It was part of the fnsp (friends newburyport skate park) plan for
folks to set up observation stations to note how many cars dropped off kids at
various points around the middle school (it is abutted by homeowners on 3
sides). The plan was not carried out. However, I made a videotape recording
from my bedroom window, of dropoffs and pick ups at the bend in the street, and
I reported the numbers, but the tape was not called upon for evidence at any
point -- it seemed satisfactory that a recording had been made, that would
allow any questions of counts to be examined.
As part of the deal in getting abutter acceptance of the park, the fnsp
building committee agreed to plant trees and shrubs to minimize visual and
sonic impacts on the neighborhood, and to put a fence around the park so that
people would not access the park after hours. The only access through the
fence being a gate from the school parking lot was also seen as a solution to
the traffic problem -- that people could only easily access the park from the
front of the school, which is located on a two lane road.
So the fence may seem like an institutional "move" to contain the skaters, but
I see it as an artifact/product that would become part of the
neighborhood/school synomorph. Together with new signs between the street and
the ballfield that indicate 'no parking' at any time, the idea has been to
solve the traffic problem on my street once and for all recreation activities
using the school facilities. People now have constraints and rules to channel
their access to these facilities via the school parking lot and entrance, and
away from neighborhood shortcuts.
What I see as important to bring to the chat analysis is an inclusion of
Barker's work, in which the physical setting plays a role in shaping behavior.
One aspect that can be brought to bear is a knotworking description in which
city, neighborhood, airspeed builders, and teh fnsp systems intersect in these
complex ways temporarily to build the park, and establish new sociocognitive
structures i.e. no parking zones, park rules; division of labor, i.e. skatepark
guards (btw, my no.2 son is a skatepark guard) youth commission, neighborhood
watchdogs; that are, in brief, the synomorphs of the future. The physical
setting with signs and fence etc, are the material forms of some of the
sociocognitive structures (rules) category.
Furthermore, the intersection of the various systems occurs variously through
the agents who are at the boundaries of the systems. This draws upon the work
I presented in seattle, in which Cindy was at the boundaries of two systems. I
can speak as one who was both a member of the neighborhood, and a member of the
fnsp. The tensions continue as one of my neighbors refuses to speak to me
(all, except my wife and i, rejected the park location behind the school).
Another is a member of the school board who abstained from voting on the park
approval, and who's husband (another neighbor) was adamently against the park
-- otherwise the school board vote was unanimously in favor. Stephanie can be
thought another boundary agent who both built the park and acted on behalf of
her skateboarding community to influence the city government process. My
interpretation is that contradictions are borne materially between systems in
part by the people who move among them. Both people and artifacts carry the
'genetic material' (elements) of extant forms of activity as they move between
systems, and in the process, elements of intersecting systems are brought into
dialectical relation with new forms of activity resulting.
but time is up. gotta go. Will take notes at the youth commission meeting --
and my prior and related conversation with the mayor was an attempt at a
chat-informed intervention; namely observing the unoffical rules (etiquette)
that skateboarders follow, and relating this observation to the city officials.
As it turns out the mayor is (perhaps unsurprisingly) good at considering the
contradictions appearing in community change anyway.
bb
=====
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:01:59 PDT