Humans Are Social Comfort Zones

In “Why Place Matters” by Wilfred M. McClay and Ted V. McAllister, the authors establish an argument of why place matters more than virtual places brought to us by technological advancements. McClay and McAllister talk about the risks as individuals and society face, when losing connection to physical space. They discuss how a feeling of “thereness” has vanished because people focus on a virtual place. Technologies around us have “absorbed our energies,” is something they mention, and it is what the satellites revolving around Earth are doing. The authors say when we move we have no emotion because we have detached ourselves very quickly from the place. McClay and McAllister reason how we all come from a place or “places” that

I think depending on where you come from contributes to people’s isolation. I know in a place like Hillsboro if you don’t kind of go along with all of the culture that this school or this town is about they won’t always fully accept you for who you are. In a city people love keeping to themselves. I am from Atlanta a lot of the communities and people shut themselves away from each other to live more independent fast city life styles. – 82 words

Interestingly, the geographic location of a city can dramatically affect the daily lives and routines of those who inhabit it. For example, the author gave an excellent example of how the differing land bases of New York and Los Angeles greatly effects architecture, and subsequently, how and how often people interact with one another. Specifically, the author stated that the high-density of New York coupled with the predominance of large skyscrapers leads to a different daily experience than what is experienced in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, the building conditions require shorter and more spread out buildings.

According to the essay “ Nature Through the Looking Glass”, the author believes that people should be part of nature, but most of the time people do not have real touch activity of nature. Under the strong competition society, it is not easy for a normal worker to go outside and interact with the nature. Those green plants on two sides of the city sidewalk is one of the chances for people to get touch to nature. More importantly, walking in the city sidewalks is easier than having a travel, which can satisfy most of the city people’s working requirement . Also, nature world will bring quiet life for people I always ask myself, if I can live without business area, after reading the essay “ The Forged City”. And I get a response, which is people need to get out of business activities and come back to nature even a short time in each day. Without interest relationship, people’s life will become simple and pure. Shopping malls cannot replace traditional city centers because people have large limitations in business malls. In contrast, people can observe different levels people in the society with equality ideas in traditional city centers. City sidewalks can fit for this requirement and provide a comfortable area for all of us. When children go

Social location can be defined in numerous ways due to the aspects that influence it. Predominantly, it is a person’s place in the world based off of race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc. All the factors that influence a person’s social location not only tell their standing or place in the world, but how they were raised, who they are looking forward to becoming, and how they will fare in the future. A person’s beliefs weigh heavily into social location more than other factors later in life. Early on, it tends to be the unchangeable features such as gender and race that weigh down.

City life involves not just the relations of people with one another or with the environment in some generic sense of spatiality or natural resources. People live

Often we wonder what really makes a city, and wonder why cities are the way they are; what qualifies them regarding quality of life, safety, economy. In a book titled The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the author Jane Jacobs talks about the importance of the relationship between streets and sidewalks versus their surrounding cities that we see each and every day. She states “Streets and their sidewalks, the main places of a city, are its most vital organs” (Jacobs 29) On instinct this is not what one would expect to be the ‘backbone’ of a city, but its true.

Chapter 1 of experiencing cities was all about the foundations of the constantly growing metropolitan city. It includes everything from facts about how fast our cities are growing to city as a state of mind. But the section that intrigued me the most was “symbolic interactionism and the study of city life.” symbolic interactivity means that people are the ones who play an active role in their environment. In other words the area you live in is going to be determined by the way you interact with others and how you live your life. This idea was not one that shocked me but allowed me to grasp a greater understanding as to why different cities are the way they are. For example, i’m from a small town in California with little to no crime. It is a pretty affluent area and people are pretty friendly. However you drive about 30 miles and you are now in one of the most dangerous cities in america, Oakland California. Here deadly shootings are a regular basis along with many other crimes. The citizens of these towns are usually right at the or below the poverty line. So to introduce this theory to me gives me a greater understanding as to why certain cities are dangerous and some aren’t. It simply

The neighborhood of residence gives choices in friends, defines social class, and provides opportunity to make the best of one's younger years. One of the biggest influences are the friends that one chooses to spend there time with, because you are who you spend most of your time with. Others will develop their opinion of someone based on the neighborhood they live in. Also, one can get real life experience by venturing out into their neighborhood and taking advantage of what it has to offer. Therefore, the neighborhood one lives in says a lot about who they

Medieval cities with their dense building-locked plazas and narrow alleys give a different perception of space than the modern planned outdoor plaza. These cities and towns were often self-evolved, carved over by uses. With dense living conditions leading to dark homes, the external spaces were designed for people to remain outdoors, making social contact on the street or square imminent as the houses often lacked light. The spaces, since self-mutated in time. Their scales varied, but they succeeded in creating fluid, elastic and malleable outdoor in-betweens which sometimes had unprogrammed enclosures, later defined by usage. The self-evolvement over time can be described as one of the reason in creating the medieval city and its extremely

Social location is how age, race, social class, religion, gender, location, jobs, etc affect people’s ideas and behavior. According to our book, “To find out why people do what they do, Sociologists look at social location” (Henslin, 2015, p. 2). Social location gives people their unique personality and beliefs and are basically what make us unique individuals.

Social location, or the status in life that people have because of their place in a society, have a huge impact on everyone. The impact that social location created could be neutral, but most of the time it will have a positive or negative impact on people. For example, an African American could be discriminated because of his ethnicity, or a patient will choose an older doctor when he needs a treatment. Different social location that we have will affect our decisions in everyday life, and most of the time it happened subconsciously, which means we don’t realize that the decisions we make are based on our social location. Like everyone else, I was affected by my own social location, both positively and negatively.

The streets of ancient cities and today’s modern metropolis have changed the way people interact and live within the city. Although streets go unnoticed and their functions are taken for granted, they significantly impact our way of living in many modes that leave a lasting impression on the city’s urban plan.

In the book The City Reader of Legates (2011), the city has been defined as a collection of primary groups and purposive associations. From a family group to a social community group, they support themselves through the association from organizations, meanwhile they all have permanent space, and those space forms the essential existence of the city. The city does not only function as a shelter, but it also has some aesthetic sense of collective unity. When discussing about citizens in the city, they become many-faceted in terms of their specialized interests, their personal background, life experiences and other aspects. In terms of heterogeneity, as Louis Wirth raised in 1938, that the city has brought different people together in the city

An essential need of the city and urban life, for bringing people together and seeing architecture as a social form. (147-148 writing on cities)