Notes on Essays, Research, and MLA Formatting English Composition / Joel Farson es·say: n. [French essai, trial, attempt] 1.to try or do. 2. A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author. The essay is a common genre in academic and literary settings, and is often either informative (exposition and explanation) or persuasive (based in argumentation). Persuasive essays include the following: ▪ ▪ ▪ Position (taking a position on an issue, for or against, for example) Proposal (offering a solution to a problem) Narrative (telling a story to make a point) “Rhetorical modes” or “patterns of development” for essays include the following (or a combination thereof): • • • • • • narration and description illustration process analysis classification comparison and contrast cause and effect the·sis: n. the claim, purpose, or main point of an essay. The thesis answers the question, “So, what are you saying? What is your point?” A thesis is about ideas, insights, interpretations, solutions. Be prepared to answer “So what?” about your thesis. Don’t just restate the obvious. Imagine your reader saying, “So, tell me something I don’t already know.” Seek out novelty and paradox. Challenge conventional wisdom. Uncover what is hidden. Where should the thesis be? Early in the essay, usually at the end of the introductory paragraph, and after a hook that piques the reader’s interest. How long should a thesis be? One or two sentences, stating the topic and your position on the topic. Things to avoid in research essays: 1. 2. 3. 4. Overworked topics (such as abortion, the death penalty, drug legalization) Topics that are too broad (titles such as “Medicine”) Topics based totally on personal experience (without outside research and support) Research based on only one source (Your essay should be original and not exist anywhere else.) Farson 1 Know Your Audience ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ Target Audience: Readers of a particular age, profession, social class or cultural identity; for example, teenagers, nurses, Asian Americans, etc. Often involves specialized or technical vocabulary. General Audience: Readers with a variety of backgrounds, average age around 35, high school education and some college, middle class, politically centrist. Friendly Audience: Expect encouragement and enthusiastic support for their position. Don’t need much background information on their issue. Want to learn new information about their issue. Unfriendly Audience: Already have a position on the issue. Expect their concerns and position to be understood and respected, so seek some common ground. Need to be convinced to change their position. Expect to see strong evidence in order to change their minds about an issue. Neutral Audience: Open to new ideas and interested in learning more about an issue. Want more background information. Expect to see, hear, or read multiple perspectives or points of view on an issue. Want to relate personally to an issue. Rhetorical appeals include the following (Greek terms): ▪ ▪ ▪ Ethos: An appeal to ethics, credibility, a sense of right and wrong Logos: An appeal to logic and reason Pathos: An appeal to emotion—fear, anger, sadness, joy, etc. Types of Evidence: ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ Facts Statistics (numbers) Experiences and observations (your own or those of others) Statements from experts or authorities (direct quotations or paraphrase) Primary research is research you conduct yourself such as an interview, survey, observation, or experiment. Secondary research is information you get from published sources such as books from the library, online databases or academic journals, etc. There are also primary sources, for example, the U.S. Constitution, a play by Shakespeare, or letters written by soldiers during the Civil War (genuine artifacts). Secondary sources would be a book about the Constitution, about Shakespeare, or a website about the Civil War. Reference books include dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, almanacs, and atlases. The “stacks” are the shelves where a library’s main collection of books are kept. Structuring Essay with Paragraphs and Topic Sentences: ▪ ▪ Title: Include an original title (and subtitle if desired) that helps your reader understand what your essay is about; for example, “Can We Talk? The Impact of Smartphones on Face-to-Face Conversation.” (Your title should not be “Essay #1.”) Introduction: Identifies your topic and its importance, and states your thesis. The introductory paragraph should begin with a hook that piques the reader’s interest such as a quotation, a question, a startling statistic, or an unusual fact. The thesis statement is often the last sentence of this paragraph. Farson 2 ▪ ▪ Body: A series of paragraphs each with a topic sentence that states the main point of the paragraph and functions as the organizing principle for the paragraph. The body provides background, explains evidence that supports your claim, and addresses and refutes opposing arguments. The essay be divided into sections with subheadings. An acronym that can be helpful in constructing paragraphs is P. I. E. (Point, Information, Explanation). Conclusion: The concluding paragraph sums-up the argument and makes a call to action or points to the future. May end with a question, quotation, or recommendation. Sample Outline: I. Introduction A. Hook (a quotation, question, unusual fact, or striking statistic) B. Present topic/issue and explain why it’s important to my reader. (Know who my audience is.) C. Thesis statement (claim). II. Body (number of body paragraphs may vary) A. First body paragraph: background and context of issue. B. Second body paragraph: most logical reason for supporting claim, with evidence. 1. Remember to include in-text citations for your sources, e.g. (Lamott 26). 2. Remember P.I.E. for paragraphs: Point, Information, Explanation. C. Third body paragraph: additional reason for supporting claim, with evidence. D. Fourth body paragraph: Reason with most impact, with evidence and sources cited. E. Fifth body paragraph: Address your critics, opposing views, and refute them. III. Conclusion A. Summarize argument. Wrap-up. B. Make a call to action or point to the future. IV. Works Cited (see MLA citation guidelines) Integrating and framing Quotations: Quotations should be preceded by signal phrases, which introduce the author of the quotation, his or her professional status, the publication, and a verb such as explains, observes, contends, suggests, writes, etc. Quotations should be followed by an in-text citation and commentary on the quotation. For example, In her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, novelist Anne Lamott contends, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft” (28). Perfectionism, Lamott argues, can prevent us from writing at all…. Think in terms of templates: ▪ ▪ ▪ In her book _________, X maintains that “___________” (107). Writing in the journal Commentary, X argues that “__________” (par. 3). According to X, “__________.” Notice the placement of commas in the signal phrase, the in-text citation indicating the page number (28) (107) or paragraph number (par. 3) for online sources with no page numbers, and the period after the parentheses ( ). Notice also the use of present tense verbs. Most academic analysis is written in the present tense. Farson 3 The following represent common errors in signal phrases: ▪ ▪ Incorrect: In John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row he writes, “_________.” (There is no antecedent for the pronoun he. “In John Steinbeck’s novel” ≠ a man ≠ he. (John Steinbeck = a man = he) Instead you may write, “In his novel Cannery Row John Steinbeck writes, “________.” There are various ways to phrase this correctly. Incorrect: In the book it says, “_________.” (Same lack of antecedent problem: the book is an it, but “in the book” is a prepositional phrase that does not qualify as an antecedent for it.) MLA citation format requires In-text citations in the body of the paper—a signal phrase or parenthetical reference such as (Lamott 26) or (Urban Design) after the cited material—and a “Works Cited” page at end. You may also include footnotes or endnotes.1 However, footnotes and endnotes in MLA are not used for citing sources, but for tangential commentary, etc. (See footnote below.) Go to “References” tab in MS Word, then click on “Insert Footnote.” Here are some common entries in the list of works cited: A book by one author: Author. Title of Book. Publisher, Year of Publication. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995. A magazine article in print: Author. “Article Title.” Magazine Title, Publication Date, Page Numbers. Sommers, Christina Hoff. “The War Against Boys.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000, pp. 59-74. A magazine article online: Author, “Article Title.” Magazine Title, Publication Date, URL. Date of Access. Cornblatt, Johanna. “Lonely Planet: Isolation Increases in U.S.” Newsweek, 20 Aug. 2009. http://www.newsweek.com/lonely-planet-isolation-increases-us-78647. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016. (Notice hanging indent: First line is flush left, following lines indented half-inch. Move bottom triangle on ruler in MS Word.) An article from a website or online encyclopedia (when no author is listed): “Article Title.” Publication Title, Date of Publication (if known), URL. Date of Access. “Urban Design.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_design Accessed 10 Oct. 2017. 1 Footnotes may include background information and commentary, definitions, statistics, historical context, etc. Farson 4 English 2: Argumentative Writing and Critical Thinking Instructor: Joel Farson MPC Teenagers and Suburban Space: Defining Problems, Designing Solutions Goal of assignment: To identify real-world problems and think critically and creatively to solve them by design. See our syllabus/course schedule in Canvas modules for due dates and associated readings. Write an essay (minimum of five pages in length with at least five sources cited in proper MLA format) in which you (1) discuss generally, even philosophically, some of the issues and challenges facing teenagers in America, drawing from and integrating quotations from our assigned readings in this unit. Then (2) identify and describe more concretely and in detail specific aspects of your own neighborhood or community that are not well-adapted to the needs or desires of teenagers. If you like, you may include photographs or drawings to illustrate aspects of your built environment that do or do not work well for teenagers. (Space taken by photographs would not count towards final page count / word count.) And finally (3) propose a creative solution—no matter how ambitious or unconventional—that would, in your view, better serve the needs or desires of teenagers. This is an opportunity to analyze and describe in detail the shortcomings of your own environment (using both primary and secondary research) and to use your imagination to reshape that environment so as to improve the quality of life for teenagers (and maybe everyone else in the process). It might be helpful to your reader to divide your essay into three parts using subheadings. The sources you cite in your paper (books, articles, studies, etc.) should come, in part, from our assigned readings but also may come from other outside sources of your own choosing that better support your own particular purposes. *Of course, to implement your proposed solutions in the real world might be difficult logistically and involve a lot of money, changes to infrastructure, etc. Do not worry about such things for this assignment. This is not a course in urban planning or public policy. This is an English course, so do your best to describe problems and solutions with words and imagination. If we can’t see it, we can’t be it. '\. ~ .. CHILDHOOD 11(2) WtY TEENAGERS, TERRITORY AND THE APPROPRIATION OF SPACE HERB CHILDRESS Duke University Key words: ownership, place use, property, teenagers, territoriality Mailing address: Herb Childress University Writing Program, Duke University, PO Box 90025, Durham, NC 27708-0025, USA. [email: herbc@duke.edu] e Childhood Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications. London. Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, Vol 11(2): 195--205. www.sagepublications.com 10.117710907568204043056 Through their legal status as 'minors', American teenagers are legally prohibited from property ownership. In order to claim places. therefore. young people must appropriate and occupy the places of others. This makes territorial markers and behavior the primary mode of spatial claiming among teens. but adults tend not to recognize the legitimacy of territory in a tenured or ownershipbased spatial system, This article explores some territorial modes of place-making, the conflicts that arise between youth and adults over their places, and the responses by teens to increased restriction and spatial surveillance of the American landscape. In 1890, the US Bureau of the Census officially declared that the frontier was closed. One-hundred-and-fourteen years later, those of us who are Americans live in a wholly owned nation. There is no place, no matter how ragged or remote, that is not legally owned by someone, some business, some organization, some government. That complexity and comprehensiveness of ownership originated at the instigation of European settlers, who brought with them an early modern concept of private property that only acknowledged a singular definition of ownership, a definition that granted the owner all possible rights to a marked parcel of land: the right to acquire, to occupy, to travel over, to use, to sell, to lend, to rent, to modify, to destroy. The Native people who already lived here did have claims to the use of localities, and competing claims often led to conflict. But it was also the case that those boundaries were fluid in time and in space, that ownership was not permanently recorded or marked. Ethnologist Tim Ingold writes about the difference in land division between mobile hunter-gatherer cultures and more stable agricultural cultures, with the former relying on the concept of territory, and the latter developing the concept of tenure. He writes that: Those less comprehensive standing claims of territory and use were easy to ignore by people who took their own more restrictive model as taken for granted, and who had the technology and capital to stake their claims and enforce their successes. Any historical uncertainty is gone now, and there is no place in our nation where we can go to stand on unowned ground or float on unowned water. There are still occasional competing claims - for instance, who has the right to take water from upstream that otherwise would have been a part of my irrigation? - but we work to constantly minimize those gray areas. Clarity of ownership is a primary goal. With careful attention and a little digging, we can discover who has the ability to set the rules of engagement in the place we're in, no matter where that is. Teenagers have limited ability to manipulate private property. They can't own it. can't modify it, can't rent it. They can only choose, occupy and use the property of others. This limitation is true in their communities, it's true in their schools, and it's true in their homes. In this way, they stand in strong opposition to modernist models of private property. They represent in many senses a hunter-gatherer social organization; to return to Ingold's language, teenagers are primarily interested in 'the location of individuals dispersed in space'. Young people are among the most frequent users of public spaces such as sidewalks, city parks, beaches and shopping centers. Is this simply because they cannot control private space, and so must appropriate public spaces until ownership rights are conferred upon them; or is it also (as I believe) because they are more intensely public beings (Childress, 2000), and only through immersion in adult expectations and institutions come to desire the hyper-privacy of American cultural landscapes? Developmental terminology is often dangerous, because it presumes tbat some people - that is, the definers of tbe terminology - are developed and have reached some pinnacle of being that all other groups are both preparatory to and desirous of. Like earlier non-modern groups and the present-day equatorial and southern hemisphere worlds, which we often call the 'pre-industrialized nations', teenagers are seen as 'pre-adult', which means that they employ a more t1uid model of social relations, that they are about to be colonized by a greater power, and that they should appreciate the intervention. Conflicts between tenure and territory ... territorial behavior is basically a mode of communication, serving to convey information about the location of individuals dispersed in space. By contrast ... tenure is a mode of appropriation, by which persons exert claims over resources dispersed in space. (T.lngold, 1987: 133) So what might a conflict look like in everyday life between adult and teenage property claims, between tenure and territory? Let me give you two examples. The first example is drawn from my most recent work, among the students of one particular high school in a small community in far northern California, in which I examined teenagers' uses and meanings of places in their homes, school and town (Childress, 2000). Curtisville High School had 195 196 CHILDRESS: TEENAGERS AND CHILDHOOD TERRITORY 11 (2) no kitchen or lunchroom, and so it had an 'open campus' policy under which students were permitted to leave the school during the 45-minute lunch period to find food. Those with cars drove to more distant delis and fast-food franchises, but the majority without access to a car - those students who were younger or poorer - walked to two nearby gas stations with mini-marts attached to them. One lies to the west, the other to the southeast, both about a 7- or 8-minute walk away. They were both Arco stations, and sold exactly the same pre-cooked and packaged food. The school's campus was open to the corrununity on the west and north sides, so kids going to the western store could simply walk across the lawn or the parking lot and leave. But the campus was fenced along its eastern and southern boundary, so that going to the eastern store meant walking backwards a bit to get to the end of the fence before walking toward lunch. This extra 2 minutes each way mattered quite a bit in the context of a short break period that already had at least 15 minutes taken up with travel. So, by the second week of school, the kids who chose that store began walking across the athletic practice field to a gap in the fence so that they could make a more direct line to the store. About a week later, this announcement appeared in the morning bulletin: 'ALL STUDENTS - WHEN LEAVING CAMPUS, please respect the rights of citizens and their property. Dispose of trash properly and stay off private property. The fence by Rasnor Road is NOT an exit - please use Murphy Road when leaving campus.' That announcement (and the posting of the assistant principal next to the hole in the fence that noon) reduced the flow of kids from roughly 50 to five. The request to the school had come from the manager of the apartment complex through which the students flowed on their shortcut to the minimart. My own examination didn't turn up much trash or worn grooves in the lawns, and the kids didn't break anything or threaten anyone when I made the trek with them about 20 times over the course of the year. The perceived threat was greater than the actual data would seemingly support. Let's look at some of the assumptions being made here. The athletic field, really just a huge expanse of unmarked and half-mown grass, was labeled and defined by its owner as 'an athletic field', implying a single correct use rather than the multiple possibilities it actually enabled as a walkway and a gathering spot. The apartment complex through which students walked was a series of two-story buildings with a fairly unattractive - and almost never-used - set of paths and some grassy areas with neglected benches and picnic tables spotted about. It was in no visible way a 'claimed space': it did not corrununicate territorial intentions. There were never any occupants through whom it would have been uncomfortable to walk, and no personal markers of ownership by a specific person. The kids did not see themselves as aggressively or defiantly challenging 'the rights of citizens and their property', because that claim was made in no tangible way. It was a physical fact that the hole in the school's fence was easy to walk through. It required no climbing, and led directly to a public street. To say emphatically that 'the fence by Rasnor Road is NOT an exit' defines an exit in some specific ways: an exit is paved; an exit is permanent; an exit is marked on a school map; an exit is within easy surveillance of the classrooms and administrative building. Finally, there were those adults who said that all of the students should just go to the western store if they didn't have enough time to walk 'the right way' to get to the eastern store. But aside from a single store's capacity for service to great numbers in a limited time, there were powerful youth ownership models that stood in the way of that choice. The western store was used every.day by a particular social group, the 'stoners', who claimed the picnic tables and seating spaces around the gas station. Their older friends who had previously graduated arrived early, opened the hatchbacks of their cars to play their stereos, and made tangible claims to possession between 11.30 and 1.30. They weren't especially threatening, and didn't actively chase other people away, but their physical presence, their regularity of attendance and the thoroughness of occupancy in terms of sound and visibility were much stronger communicators of ownership than the invisible deed to the apartment complex. Those students who were members of other social groups needed a place of their own to claim, which sent them in the other direction. So the conflict here was actually not a conflict between individual people, but rather between definitional systems, a conflict between cultural ways of knowing and defining property rights, a conflict between the experiential and communicative space of use and the formal space of resource regulation. My second example is from work I did earlier in Wisconsin, in a small town of about 2000 people (Childress, 1994). This town is a conservative, homogeneous community with a very small commercial area located at the intersection of two county roads. In the months I studied the community, walking all through it, drawing maps and noting historical sites, I never saw an adult outdoors except in a car or walking on the sidewalk directly from a store to its own parking lot. There was a large public park, a whole town block, tidy and nicely groomed and vacant, in the middle of a residential neighborhood. As I was doing my surveying of homes and commercial buildings, I was in town late one evening, and noticed a bunch of kids and cars in a parking lot of a tire store at the four corners. The store was closed, it was getting dark out, and there were about five cars and maybe a dozen young people there. I was fascinated, because they were the first public gathering I had seen in this place. So I went to talk with them, and found that some group of young people collected there every night between dusk and midnight or so. It was a smaller group on weeknights and in bad weather, and as many as 30 197 198 /1 / CHILDRESS: TEENAGERS AND TERRITORY CHILDHOOD or so on summer Saturdays, but it was inevitable that some kids - the same kids - would be there every night. I later met the owner of the tire store, and asked him how long the kids had been hanging out there. He said, 'I bought the store 12 years ago, and the kids came with it.' So we're talking about generations of kids; there weren't any 30-year-olds there, but those who used this lot were following in the tradition of their older brothers and sisters, their aunts and uncles, maybe even their parents. The sheriff's deputies rolled by periodically, occasionally stopping to reprimand the kids if someone was tossing firecrackers into the street or to write a ticket if someone had his or her beer too visible. But the deputies couldn't really tell them to leave unless they were doing something truly unlawful. The kids all knew that the lot wasn't 'theirs' in any formal terms, but they were able to use the legal structure of 'private property' to defend them from orders of dispersal. If they had gathered at the high school, or at the park, or actually out in an intersection of streets, they would have been in a publicly owned place over which public officials had jurisdiction. At Pippert Tires, they were able to borrow ownership in a protective way. The youth act of 'appropriating' a space is somewhat similar to the adult act of purchasing and modifying a space, taking control and placing identity markers. However, it also includes the added aspect of the modification of adult rules of use or engagement, and in this way becomes an implicit political statement as well, a counter-positioning of experiential and modern cultural norms. The Pippert lot is a place of control and exclusion, a place where this group can come together and say, 'this is ours, at least temporarily'. There aren't many places like that for people in their teens; certainly not their parents' homes or at school or work, all of which have deeply held and protected adult ownership rules that extend even into nominally private spaces such as their bedrooms and school lockers. At Pippert, they can come together, set up the place the way they like it, have complete control over their comings and goings and who they associate with. New members have to be introduced by established ones; you don't just walk onto the lot in your first day in town and become a part of this group. Sociologist Ray Oldenberg writes of what it takes to become a 'regular' in any sort of social place (Oldenberg, 1989). Belonging to a claimed place, whether a parking lot or a row of bar stools, is a communicative process that relies on learning a verbal and nonverbal language, one that often begins with an unstated 'sponsorship' by one of the current regulars. Kids' control over a territory, of course, is more fragile than they'd like to admit. If a couple of adults really wanted to close that gathering down, all they'd have to do is come early and set up lawn chairs and sit down in the middle of the lot. Then they would be making a territorial claim of their own 199 I - - _ 11 (2) - a very simple statement of almost immediate and global recognizability: 'Here we are. Deal with it.' That claim would disrupt the prior claim of the youth, and the higher social standing of the adults would make it unlikely that the kids would challenge their elders' tenure statement. This somewhat whimsical image - two or three adults sitting in lawn chairs in the gravel parking lot of a closed store - draws its absurdity from the deep cultural beliefs that make it unlikely. Tenure is about ownership, about privacy, about removing oneself from the uncertainties of public living. As we continue to move from the neighborhood to the walled cul-de-sac development, from the front porch to the back patio, from the town square to the shopping center, we collectively assert that we prefer the clarity and accompanying isolation of private life, ignoring that a large segment of the population either disagrees with that preference or cannot have access to it. And through our decreasing access to public life, we forget how to read it. Markings of public space such as graffiti are in part a marking of the kids' interior environment (Docuyanan, 2000). The outside wall of an abandoned store or second-floor parapet is the inside of some kid's lived space. As such, graffiti serves both a decorative and a claiming function, much as placing a piece of art in the living room does for adults (Marcus, 1995). But the youth claiming function is deemed illegitimate, because our culture operates under a tenure model rather than a territory model of land use, because we think of space as owned rather than occupied. Variations in acceptable presence in public space Australian urban analyst Cathy Wilkinson suggests that, 'isolation tends to produce narcissism .... Social relations help individuals experience mature life, and a related view is [that] the willingness to embrace urban disorder indicates maturity' (Wilkinson, 1998: 194). But in a tenure-based property system, the desire for privacy and exclusive ownership is seen as the 'mature' or 'correct' behavior, and willingness to behave publicly in public places is often considered threatening (Matthews et al., 2000). This perceived threat leads to a variation in the acceptability of public space use, based both on the scale and homogeneity of social organization (as in Tonnies' concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft) and on an individual's or group's position within the larger society. In small, stable, face-to-face societies (established neighborhoods, rural communities, etc.), public space use by group members is likely to be tacitly legitimized and accepted, because those public actors would be known and more nearly trusted; in larger, more mobile, more anonymous societies, especially when the public user group is somehow 'other' than the local norm - whether through age or ethnicity - social public gathering is more likely to be perceived as threatening, since we do not know the individuals involved but rather only their surface features. 200 _ -~ / L CHILDRESS: TEENAGERS AND TERRITORY Thus in America, where curfew and loitering codes already target young people, public-space gatherings among teens of color are likely on two different counts to be seen as socially aggressive and thus result in police or security-force intervention. A study conducted in the Denver police force showed that 'racial profiling', typically thought of as a vehicular phenomenon (as in the common expression 'driving while black'), extends to the pedestrian arena as well (J. Ingold, 2002). Police contacts were disproportionately more frequent for Hispanic and African-American pedestrians than for whites, and resulted in a far greater proportion of 'field interviews', background checks and searches. Similar data were reported for the cities of San Diego and St Louis, and by sociologist Sandra Bass (200 1) in Chinese and Korean communities in the US as well, indicating a widespread discrimination against people of color in American public spaces. Gatherings of males are also considerably more likely to be dispersed or harassed than gatherings of females or of mixed-sex teens (Matthews et al., 2000). This is likely also due to a higher fear of male teens and young adults, but may also reflect the greater ability or willingness of boys to use public space; girls tend to have more parental restrictions on mobility, greater fear of unfamiliar or unsupervised places, and resistance to use of many public recreational spaces because of body-image concerns (James, 200 1; Matthews, 200 I ; 0' Brien et al., 2(00). Differences between experiential and modern concepts of place ownership Young people's concept of ownership seems to be use based rather than fixed. Most generally stated, when someone's in a space, it's theirs, and when they're not, it's up for grabs. This is the broad rule they apply to their own use, and to use and ownership by others. This general rule is modified by several variable indicators of ownership and investment in a place: • Physical boundaries such as fences, hedges, gates and doors, and vertical elements like steps and curbs. If you have to touch something or make a physical effort to enter a place, that is a tactile indicator of someone else's intentions toward that place, and announces someone's claim upon it. • Clarity of ownership markers such as yard furniture, trimmed lawns and gardens, recent maintenance and cleanliness. These all indicate human presence and care, even though the people themselves may be currently unseen. They represent a non-verbal communication of expected habitation patterns. • Known frequency, regularity and traditions of occupancy. If a place is known to be commonly inhabited by a specific group, that represents a communicated claim that individuals can honor, or that they 201 CHILDHOOD 11 (2) can challenge at their periL The two Arcos were each the site of one fight during the year, in which an interloping group knew where to find their opponents, and knew that the challenge to territory would be answered. • Scale and humanity of presumed ownership. A corporation or institution holds little experiential claim over places - kids don't imagine that they're injuring anyone or depriving anyone of something when they informally use a place that's anonymously owned. An engaged small business holds more claim over its space, and an individual or group of individuals have greatest claim. Because of this communicative aspect of territory, typologically equal places (parking lots, for example) will differ in use and desirability by teenagers based on specific physical characteristics including size, enclosure, outward visibility, social access, defensibility and connections to major traffic paths (Childress, 1994; Eubanks-Owens, 1988). All of these are communicative devices; if, in our second example, the kids had chosen a parking lot a mile and a half from downtown at the edge of the woods, they would have been making an entirely different statement about the fluidity and visibility they desired from their social interactions than the statement of choosing a highly visible location at the center of town. Appropriateness of space use is temporally fluid as well. In some places, like the Pippert lot, kids can go and sit or play ball for hours on end because the occupancy markers of the stores around it show an expectation that night-time use won't be interrupted by impacted neighbors. There are some places kids can claim for a limited period of time, like the picnic tables at the Arco mini-mart; some places kids can walk through without stopping, like the outdoor spaces of the apartment complex; and some places kids just can't go into even for a second, like someone's porch. We can read non-verbal territory markers pretty well, and behave accordingly (for example, Chaudhury, 1994). From physical to virtual space? In contrast to considerable research demonstrating that American adults engage in less voluntary association than in decades past (summarized most succinctly by Putnam, 2000), teenage voluntary association seems not to have decreased or significantly changed form. (Teenage involuntary or quasi-voluntary activity, however, is on the increase: teens who historically had after-school hours largely at their own disposal increasingly find those hours occupied by school extracurriculars, sports and arts lessons, and other possibly chosen but certainly regulated activities which are seen as safer or more productive options by parents and other adults.) The contrast is thus increased between youth and adult expectations and behaviors, and pressures 202 / / CHILDRESS: TEENAGERS AND CHILDHOOD TERRITORY 11 (2) be a recreational function (as in Oakland, California, where urban youth gather at intersections and parking lots for high-performance driving parties called 'sideshows'), or can take on political purposes as in the recent WTO protests in Seattle (Lee, 2002). Teenagers occupy a different space than most of their adult counterparts: the meaning-laden space of use and belonging; the political space of appropriation; the temporally fluid space of arrival, claiming and departure. Kids make great social use of their communities' leftovers - the negative space in the positively planned and owned world - and pioneer the use of new virtual spaces that adults often do not see. Just as we as adults have full rights to tenured space, we should recognize teens' rights to their territories. It is up to us as adults not to immediately denigrate that which we cannot own, to forego power and help youth and adult cultures to coexist in their parallel worlds. against 'loitering' are tighter and more restrictive than in earlier generations (as shown in Eubanks-Owens [1997] and Males [1996] on curfews). The adult hold on space is becoming more thorough than ever. Urban historian Sanford Gaster has written a fascinating account of the restriction of children's recreation within one neighborhood in New York City (Gaster, 1991). He found that, in the generations between 1915 and 1975, children in this neigbborhood used successively fewer places within the neighborhood, faced increasing numbers of physical barriers to place use, experienced more direct control of places they might use, and participated far more often in professionally supervised activities. These restrictions seem to be not of the children's choosing, but rather a hewing of child behavior to adult expectations of adequate safety and supervision (and by extension, of 'correct' ways of being children). Why has this happened? Aside from increased adult fear for kids and (ifkids (Males, 1996) and the increasing professionalism of recreation provision (Cranz, 1982), there is a hardening of ownership that works to hyperdefine space. As capital works harder to wring every last cent out of an lowned space, there are fewer commercial leftovers. Increasing numbers of places are more finished, more corporately and distantly owned, and thus more protected and less negotiable (Gaster, 1991). Broadening of insurance restrictions as an instrument of capital conservation brings about increasing limitations on street play such as skateboarding (Childress, 2000; Hall, 1992). These pressures are increasing: there is no reason to expect these pressures to spontaneously diminish for any reason. As property becomes more expensive and more protected, we can expect it to be increasingly difficult to be a teenager in American public space (see, for instance, the photographs of an amazing array of 'anti-personnel' landscape features, mostly aimed at preventing skateboarding, in Adbusters, January/February 2003, which themselves are a more specialized echo of a broader trend of anti-personnel landscapes aimed at reducing vagrancy and public drunkenness, as shown in Whyte, 1979). At least in part because of these restrictions, teenagers and young adults are entering electronic space (through the telephone and the internet) as a new rhetorical and experiential landscape. A recent study indicated that over 40 percent of young people were 'regular users' of cellular telephones (PC Magazine, 2001), and cell phone manufacturers are responding with phone designs aimed at a teen market (Lee, 2002). Social life that is prohibited in space may reappear for many young people through chat rooms, instant messaging, virtual gaming and the telephone. An interesting contemporary phenomenon comes with the mixing of physical and virtual space. The use of cell phones allows for immediate and decentralized decision-making about gathering points; crowds of considerable size - dubbed by Howard Rheingold (2002) as 'smart mobs' - can be mobilized in short amounts of time through an informal phone tree. This can AdBusters (2003) Jan.lFeb. # 45. Bass, S. (2001) 'Policing Space, Policing Race: Social Control Imperatives and Police Discretionary Decisions', Social Justice 28(1): 156-76. Chaudhury, H. (1994) 'Territorial Personalization and Place-Identity: A Case Study in Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas', Proceedings of the Environmental Design Research Association's Conference. San Antonio, Texas. 'Childress, H. (1994) 'No Loitering: Some Thoughts on Small-Town Teenage Hangouts', Small Town 24(2): 20-5, Childress, H. (2000) Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of joy: Curtisville in the Lives of its Teenagers. Albany: SUNY Press. Cranz, G. (1982) The Politics of Park Design. Cambridge, MA: MlT Press. Docuyanan, F. (2000) 'Crackdown or Cultivation?', paper presented at the Environmental Design Research Association conference. San Francisco. Eubanks-Owens, P. (1997) 'Adolescence and the Cultural Landscape: Public Policy, Design Decisions, and Popular Press Reporting', Landscape and Urban Planning 39: 153-66. Eubanks-Owens, P. (1988) 'Natural Landscapes, Gathering Places, and Prospect Refuges: Characteristics of Outdoor Places Valued By Teens', Children's Environments Quarterly 5(2): 17-24. Gaster, S. (1991) 'Urban Children's Access to their Neighborhood: Changes over Three Generations', Environment and Behavior 23(1): 70-85. Hall, L.A. (1992) 'Teenagers in Suburbia: A Case Study in Rohnert Park, California', MA thesis, California at Berkeley. Ingold, J. (2002) 'Profile Study Sparks Debate: Police Search Whites Less Often', Denver Post 3 November: B I. Ingold, T. (1987) The Appropriation of Nature. Ames: University of Iowa Press. James, K. (2001) , "1 Just Gotta Have My Own Space!": The Bedroom as a Leisure Site for Adolescent Girls', journal of Leisure Studies 33( I): 71-90. Lee, J. (2002) 'Youth Will be Served, Wirelessly", New York Times 30 May: G 1. Males, M.A. (1996) The Scapegoat Generation. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Marcus, C (1995) House as a Mirror of Self Berkeley: Conari f/.r,'i(ss. Matthews, H. (2001) 'The Influence of Gender on the Environmental Cognition of Young Boys and Girls', journal of Genetic Psychology 147(3): 295-302. 203 204 References CHILDRESS: TEENAGERS AND TERRITORY Matthews, H., M. Taylor, B. Percy-Smith and M. Limb. (2000) 'The Unacceptable Flaneur: The Shopping Mall as a Teenage Hangout', Child/wad 7(3): 279-94. O'Brien, M, D. Jones, D. Sloan and M. Rustin. (2000) 'Children's Independent Spatial Mobility in the Urban Public Realm', Childhood 7(3): 257-77. Olden berg, R. (1989) The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon. PC Magazine (2001) 'Mobile Phones: Tools of the Young', 6 March: 71. Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster. Rheingold, H. (2002) The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus. Whyte, W.H. (1979) The Social Life of SIIUlll Urban Spaces (videorecording). New York: Municipal Art Society of New York. Wilkinson, C. (1998) 'Deconstrucring the Fort: The Role of Postmodernity in Urban Development', Journal of Australian Studies June: 194(1). CJ 205 / English 2: Argumentative Writing and Critical Thinking Instructor: Joel Farson MPC Teenagers and Suburban Space: Defining Problems, Designing Solutions Goal of assignment: To identify real-world problems and think critically and creatively to solve them by design. See our syllabus/course schedule in Canvas modules for due dates and associated readings. Write an essay (minimum of five pages in length with at least five sources cited in proper MLA format) in which you (1) discuss generally, even philosophically, some of the issues and challenges facing teenagers in America, drawing from and integrating quotations from our assigned readings in this unit. Then (2) identify and describe more concretely and in detail specific aspects of your own neighborhood or community that are not well-adapted to the needs or desires of teenagers. If you like, you may include photographs or drawings to illustrate aspects of your built environment that do or do not work well for teenagers. (Space taken by photographs would not count towards final page count / word count.) And finally (3) propose a creative solution—no matter how ambitious or unconventional—that would, in your view, better serve the needs or desires of teenagers. This is an opportunity to analyze and describe in detail the shortcomings of your own environment (using both primary and secondary research) and to use your imagination to reshape that environment so as to improve the quality of life for teenagers (and maybe everyone else in the process). It might be helpful to your reader to divide your essay into three parts using subheadings. The sources you cite in your paper (books, articles, studies, etc.) should come, in part, from our assigned readings but also may come from other outside sources of your own choosing that better support your own particular purposes. *Of course, to implement your proposed solutions in the real world might be difficult logistically and involve a lot of money, changes to infrastructure, etc. Do not worry about such things for this assignment. This is not a course in urban planning or public policy. This is an English course, so do your best to describe problems and solutions with words and imagination. If we can’t see it, we can’t be it. How Suburban Design Is Failing Teen-Agers Hamilton, William L . New York Times , Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]06 May 1999: 1. ProQuest document link ABSTRACT (ABSTRACT) Designers of the newest American suburbs say they have largely ignored or avoided one volatile segment of the population -- teen-agers. In recent conversations, three dozen urban planners, architects, environmental psychologists and sociologists, and experts on adolescent development agreed that specific community planning and places for teen-agers to make their own are missing. Virtually every other special interest has been addressed by enlightened suburban designers -- the elderly, the disabled, families with young children. But, said Andres Duany, a planner who is a leading proponent of the ''new urbanism,'' a model of suburban design based on principles of traditional towns, ''it's the teen-agers I always bring up as a question mark.'' Mr. Duany said that he had only once or twice included teen-agers in the public process of planning a suburban development. Though teen-agers tend to resist advice and choose their own turf as a territorial issue of establishing self-identity, most experts interviewed say that design could constructively anticipate and accommodate anxieties of adolescence. They agreed that teen-agers need a place to congregate in and to call their own; it is a critical aspect of relieving the awkward loneliness of adolescence. Between home and school -- spheres compromised by the presence of parents or the pressure of performance -- places for teen-agers in the suburbs are as uncommon as sidewalks. FULL TEXT AS quickly as the word ''alienation'' can be attached to the idea of youth, the image of isolation can be attached to a picture of the suburbs. Is there an unexplored relationship between them? It is a question parents and urban planners alike are raising in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. At a time when the renegade sprawl of suburbs themselves is being intensely scrutinized, the troubling vision of a nation re-pioneered in vast tracts of disconnected communities has produced uneasy discussion about the psychological disorientation they might house. Created as safe havens from the sociological ills of cities, suburbs now stand accused of creating their own environmental diseases: lack of character and the grounding principles of identity, lack of diversity or the tolerance it engenders, lack of attachment to shared, civic ideals. Increasingly, the newest, largest suburbs are being criticized as landscapes scorched by unthoughtful, repetitious building, where, it has been suggested, the isolations of larger lots and a car-based culture may lead to disassociation from the reality of contact with other people. Designers of the newest American suburbs say they have largely ignored or avoided one volatile segment of the population -- teen-agers. In recent conversations, three dozen urban planners, architects, environmental PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 5 psychologists and sociologists, and experts on adolescent development agreed that specific community planning and places for teen-agers to make their own are missing. ''They're basically an unseen population until they pierce their noses,'' said William Morrish, a professor of architecture and the director of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota. ''They have access to computers and weaponry. The sense of alienation that might come from isolation or neglect will have a much larger impact than it might have before. And there are no questions coming from the design community about what we can be doing about this. We don't invite them in.'' Virtually every other special interest has been addressed by enlightened suburban designers -- the elderly, the disabled, families with young children. But, said Andres Duany, a planner who is a leading proponent of the ''new urbanism,'' a model of suburban design based on principles of traditional towns, ''it's the teen-agers I always bring up as a question mark.'' Mr. Duany said that he had only once or twice included teen-agers in the public process of planning a suburban development. ''It's a good point,'' he said, as though it were an unlikely idea. ''I should talk to the kids.'' Though teen-agers tend to resist advice and choose their own turf as a territorial issue of establishing self-identity, most experts interviewed say that design could constructively anticipate and accommodate anxieties of adolescence. They agreed that teen-agers need a place to congregate in and to call their own; it is a critical aspect of relieving the awkward loneliness of adolescence. Between home and school -- spheres compromised by the presence of parents or the pressure of performance -- places for teen-agers in the suburbs are as uncommon as sidewalks. ''It's a paradoxical situation,'' said Ray Suarez, host of ''Talk of the Nation'' on National Public Radio and author of ''The Old Neighborhood'' (The Free Press, 1999), a study of suburban migration . ''Parents move there for their children; their children are dying to get out.'' Like much of the Western United States, Denver is experiencing vertiginous suburban growth. From 1990 to 1996, the metropolitan area expanded by two-thirds, to its current size of 535 square miles. ''Typical of the Denver metro area are the new suburbs, where 'downtown' is a four-way intersection with three shopping centers and a condo development,'' said Charles Blosten, community services director for Littleton's city planning division. Highlands Ranch, Denver's largest suburban development, has its own ZIP code, ''nothing but rooftops and miles and miles of nothing,'' he said of the numbing vista of houses.. ''It's got to affect people.'' The idea that place has an impact on adolescent development and socialization is accepted by most experts on the suburbs but is only now beginning to be studied. ''A culture of impersonality has developed in the suburbs by the way they're laid out,'' said Jonathan Barnett, a professor of regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania and author of ''The Fractured Metropolis'' (HarperCollins, 1996). In the newer suburbs, ''the standard of houses is high, but the standard of community isn't,'' he continued, adding, ''It's most people's impression of modern life.'' And the people it stands to impress the most are children. ''They are the most vulnerable people growing up there,'' said Dr. Jose Szapocznik, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Center for Family Studies at the University of Miami. ''As a child you're disabled by not being able to walk anywhere. Nothing is nearby.'' PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 5 Mr. Morrish said he thought that public transportation to metropolitan downtowns was crucial for high-school students. He said that the ability to access ''the system'' -- the world adults create -- was a vital form of empowerment. ''What to do after school, how to get to the city, to see other people and how to negotiate this without parents,'' he said, posing the issues. ''Teen-agers have to have better access to the public realm and public activity.'' He recalled a conversation with a group of high school students who met with the Design Center, which invites teen-agers to group meetings when it is commissioned to study neighborhoods. ''One girl said, 'All I've got is the Pizza Hut,' '' Mr. Morrish said. '' 'You go there a lot or you go to somebody's house -we're tired of both.' '' Between home and school, in a landscape drawn by cars and the adults who drive them, is there even a particular place that teen-agers can call their own? Peter Lang, a professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an editor of ''Suburban Discipline'' (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), a collection of essays, said: ''In most suburbs, there's not even a decent park, because everyone has a backyard. But older kids never play in the backyard. They'll find even the crummiest piece of park.'' Typically, the students at Columbine High School went to Southwest Plaza, a two-level mall that has video arcades, food courts and stores, supervised by security guards and closed by 9 P.M. ''Like any suburban community, there's not a lot of places to go and hang out,'' Mr. Blosten said of Littleton. ''I tell you this because that's where my daughter goes -- the mall.'' Mr. Lang said he thought that places like malls were not adequate gathering spaces for teen-agers, calling them, like many public suburban venues, commercially and environmentally ''controlled space.'' He added, ''They are not places for free expression or hanging out.'' Disagreeing that suburbs create greater alienation is Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. But he said that he thought recent tragedies like the incident in Littleton do ''wake people up to the notion that there is parental disengagement in affluent suburbs.'' He added: ''We did a a study on latchkey kids. The kids most likely to be left unattended for long periods were middle class, in sprawling professional suburbs. Isolated for long periods of time, there's no counterbalancing force to fantasy.'' The desire for more and cheaper land that has pushed suburbs to rural exurbia may result in teen-agers who are alone for large parts of the day. Mr. Morrish pointed out that in communities like Modesto, in the San Joaquin Valley in central California, people commute to jobs in the San Francisco area, where they enroll their children in schools. ''Some people in California are taking their kids with them,'' he said, ''making the kids commute.'' The planners who have been most vocally and visibly at work on restructuring the suburban model have been ''new urbanists'' like Mr. Duany. Their solutions to the wheeling nebulae of tract development are based on tighter concentrations of houses, businesses and public spaces connected by townlike elements -- porches, sidewalks and parks -- that have largely disappeared from the new residential landscape. If teen-agers find their place there, in new towns like Columbia and Kentlands in Maryland or Celebration, the PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 5 Disney-built town in Florida, it is not because of any bravery on the planners' part. They often foster nostalgic views of families with young children. But like conventional suburbs, they overlook the inevitability of teen-agers in their design. Peter Katz, who with Vincent Scully wrote ''The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community'' (McGrawHill, 1993), spoke of the importance to teen-agers of a place that existed only for them, neither hidden and ignored nor exposed and supervised -- in effect, a secret place in full view. On a visit, Mr. Katz discovered that for Celebration's teen-agers, it was a narrow bridge, ''with low railings, that goes from downtown to the health club.'' He continued: ''They find each other. They sit on the railing. It's on the route to daily life -- not a back alley, but not the town square.'' Mr. Katz suggested that such a structure could become a conscious part of a community design for teen-agers. For Diane Dorney, a mother with two teen-age children who lives in Kentlands, Md., a 10-year-old ''new urban'' suburb of some 1,800 people, the hallmarks of town life work well for both parents and children. Ms. Dorney and her husband, Mark, moved their family from a typical town-house development. ''We wanted to raise our kids in a place that provided more than just a house,'' she said. ''It's a diverse community, of age and income,'' with older people, young couples, families. Ms. Dorneye said that she thought the gaze of the town created a sense of extended family and moral weight that were its most important success. ''Someone sneaking down the street to have a cigarette -- they don't get away with it,'' she said. ''I don't think teenagers should be left on their own until they're caught at the small things.'' She continued, ''When they go into the big things, they know how big they are.'' She added: ''And we have another way of knowing these kids, other than the bad things. They're your neighbors, too. You're always seeing them. You give them another chance.'' Photograph FAR AS THE EYE CAN BUY -- Highlands Ranch, a development south of Denver, has its own ZIP code. Does it nurture community? (Jim Richardson); KENTLANDS -- Downtown, Jessica and Brenna Dorney see friends. (Marty Katz for The New York Times)(pg. F4) DETAILS Subject: Suburban areas; Teenagers; Urban planning; Sociology; Neighborhoods Publication title: New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. Pages: 1 Number of pages: 0 Publication year: 1999 Publication date: May 6, 1999 Section: F PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 5 Publisher: New York Times Company Place of publication: New York, N.Y. Country of publication: United States, New York, N.Y. Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States ISSN: 03624331 CODEN: NYTIAO Source type: Newspapers Language of publication: English Document type: News Accession number: 05529456 ProQuest document ID: 431171634 Document URL: https://login.ezproxy.hartnell.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/4 31171634?accountid=937 Copyright: Copyright New York Times Company May 6, 1999 Last updated: 2017-11-15 Database: U.S. Newsstream Database copyright  2020 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM Page 5 of 5
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