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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Well, I guess we have a different idea of what "numerous" means, and if you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc, well, I think that is on you.

  • -12

you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc

It looks like a slum area, and that is not meant disrespectfully. It's that kind of old-time, high-density city living, where people did live in tenements and so all your business was done in the street and the road - hanging out washing across the street, kids playing in the road, people sitting on boxes kissing, etc. Inner city life in the big cities, the archetypal image of New York with people sitting on the steps up to the apartment buildings that we know from TV and the movies, or the mill towns of the English midlands, the rows of terraced houses or the poorer back-to-back ones.

So I think that is what is driving a lot of the response to this poster - it's giving off signals to us of "crowded, poverty-stricken, life in tenements" along with the graffiti etc. and not "exciting urban life with diversity and gentrified spaces". Because to make those apartments liveable, the neighbourhood needs to have been gentrified so the organic-farming, gender queer, LGBT+, Muslima BIPOC kite-flying wheelchair users aren't living in squalor.

Well, I guess we have a different idea of what "numerous" means

The ground-floor walls are completely filled with graffiti. There literally couldn't be any more! There's even some underneath the greenery on the wall behind the kissing couple, implying it's been there, with no one cleaning it up, for enough time to let the plant cover the wall – a few years, at least. (After writing this paragraph, I realised it was just pointless nitpicking. Feel free to ignore it.)

if you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc, well, I think that is on you.

You can easily find photos of children playing football in Brazilian favelas. People go about their lives, even if they live in horrible slums. That doesn't mean it's incorrect to describe slums, and the social and political system that produced them, as dysfunctional.