I have just got back from spending a week in San Francisco, visiting la novia who was visiting her week-old nephew with the rest of family in tow. A great time was had by all of course, in a great city with some wonderful people, but now I am back in the surreal reality of fieldwork (although I understand that a visit to California is not the same as a visit to reality).

The reason that I like San Francisco is that the city, and parts of the suburbs, were designed for two feet, and this makes it very different from the average US city. It also makes a bit of a change from Santo Domingo, whose recent city design (as with everything else) is too busy looking at the US for inspiration rather than at what works. Hence rather than designing centrapetally, creating spaces for interaction, where retail, leisure and business spaces interact, they are just whacking sub-urban and sub-standard shopping centres up everwhere, and making it impossible to walk anywhere. The Foucault in me says this is a power exercise of the yipeta'd classes over the publico classes, excluding them from their spaces, but I often tell the Foucault in me to shut up.

Now, I am a big fan of Jane Jacobs (the Canadian, not the Australian). I believe that cities should be communities, and that designing around the car is the wrong thing to do. Perhaps that is why I like the colonial zone so much. It was a bold new project, and is distinctly different from its early 16th century contemporaries in Spain. Rather than having small side streets coming off the main street, the colonial zone has almost equally sized broad boulevards, set out in straight lines. This is clearly a space for interaction, rather than excluding the poor to the side streets.
It was also so the rich could drive their carriages everywhere, predicting events five centuries into the future.

My thoughts on this were provoked by a strange sight today, or rather, the absense of one. Normally the pavements around Parque Independencia are overflowing with people selling fruit, flowers, books and other assorted items. I often pick up some pineapple on my way around, exchanging money and pleasantries with the storekeepers. Today the pavements were empty, and had a post-apocalyptic air to them. The park had a completely different character, partly the result of the fact that you could walk along the pavement without being forced into the road by a pile of bananas. Having asked around, it seems that the town council has banned people from selling things from the pavement, as part of their plan to "clean up" Santo Domingo. In other words, make it like a US city, with no street vendors. This annoys me, as not only does it remove my source of cheap fruit, but also the street level social interaction that makes the colonial zone much more "alive" than the more sterile places in the middle class suburbs. Maybe the people who make these decisions don't want to interact with other people. Santo Domingo folk are pathologically inconsiderate to the feelings of others (witness their behaviour in public events), and their selfishness is creating an urban landscape that is selfish, devoid of character, unlovable and unlivable.