here & now
▉1 “During
our 2A trip to New York, I was with an adjunct trying to find our way to a site. We were lost and I was worried about missing my prayers since it was getting late, and so I asked if I could make a quick stop to pray somewhere quiet. Instead, the adjunct told me to pray out in the open, right there on the sidewalk where we were standing. So I did.”
█2
“A student asked our global urbanism prof why the name of his course referred to ‘global urbanism’. He was confused. She explained that most material presented in the lectures was still overwhelmingly western, and the non-western examples were almost always presented in comparison to western standards. He became very defensive and claimed that there were not enough sources available to make his course global. After a somewhat heated argument with our class, he told us the material for future students would be more ‘exotic’. Many of the individual case studies assigned in cities outside Europe and North America were by foreign Europeans imposing master plans abroad (e.g. Henri Prost’s Casablanca Master Plan). Why is it so hard for non-western forms of urbanism to be respected as valid precedents in their own right?”
“Why is it so hard for non-western forms of urbanism to be respected as valid precedents in their ?” █3 “When I was in 1B, they added a single additional reading about mosques to the cultural history course to make it ‘more diverse’. We never got to it. At least our class was never forced to read the Bible like so many of those before us.” 03
