tomorrow

Finally back to Melbourne.

My life recently has featured nothing but the daily chores of eating, sleeping and going online; but a major element that plays an important part in this unsubstantial routine is the suburb that I'm living in, aka Footscray.

Footscray is a place that has been mentioned very often in news these recent months, as there have been quite a few attacks on ethnic inhabitants, mostly Indians, resulting in deaths and severe injuries, which, in term, spiced up the awareness of this political hot-potato called race in Melbourne, which, until recently, has not been an issue for years.

The phenomenon is undeniably visible. If unfortunately one has to arrive at the Footscray train station after nine o'clock at night, he would witness how fast otherwise casual Melburnians can walk, how everyone is on constant alert of everyone else, and how every dark corner, every small laneway and every traffic lighting intersection, can potentially viewed as safety hazard zones.

Other than this continuous worrying over one's own life, this has been a rather interesting phenomenon for me. What attracts my attention is not the political, moral or the racial implications, as they are way beyond my understandings, but rather, it creates a close environment where everything you learnt about urban design is true.

Take phenomenology, which our friend F kindly described as bullshit, could most of the time fail to be relevant because it inevitably makes some fundamental assumptions: that humans interact with the place that they are in, that humans make subconscious decisions, etc. In a daily metropolitan context, I would say, people make strong, conscious decisions (e.g. where to go, at what speed, etc.) before they even entering the arena of the place, and the information overload of our societies almost guarantee a loss of interaction between people and place. That is, until you come to Footscray at night, one wouldn’t be able to anticipate or make absolute decisions, due to overwhelming environment, and hence, they do become lab rats and do exactly what textbooks say they would do, things like being attracted by warm yellow streetlights and not the cold white lights because it feels safer, etc.