Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AS INFRASTRUCTURE
No matter how physically removed they are from the neighborhoods of the peo -
ple they hold, the urban exostructure of prisons and jails remain firmly rooted as
institutions of the city, as everyday parts of life for people, affecting their homes,
social networks, and movements.
An analysis of any million-dollar block will demonstrate how the overlapping
resources of these networks conflate individuals and infrastructure, the local and
the global, the close and the far, the piece and the system. Doing anything here—
attempting to restructure the way the criminal justice system works—means
working with contingent, dynamic, and overlapping systems and collaborations
between multiple agencies, tools, and techniques.
What does it mean to design policy, to design multiple policies, around a single
place?
The maps are both a picture and a design strategy. The picture is an aggregate
situation. The design strategy is “start from the block and build,” incrementally,
new networks that might inform this crippled urban infrastructure.
In this way, these maps depart radically from the maps and statistical analy -
ses that fueled mid-twentieth-century efficient city, urban renewal, and policing
projects. The map is not a top-down view. And neither is it a bottom-up account.
It is both.
Identify an area. Zoom in and examine the specific conditions. Zoom out and
then consider both scales at the same time. The resulting image is no longer hard
data. It is a soft map that is infinitely scalable, absolutely contingent, open to vision
and hence revision.