Sean Tarjoto								Sept 8, 2002	
Urban Space & Resistance						Me and The City

	I have lived in both cities and suburbs. I was born in a small tropical Portuguese colony called Macao. A year later my mother and I moved across the Bay of Kowloon to Hong Kong, where I spent a year learning to swim, write, play and tie my shoelaces. I remember a castle, a large tropical aquarium with some upside down fish, smoke and yellow cabs, skyscrapers and typhoons. I have pictures of friends from five different countries at a school birthday party. I remember playing indoors, inside a large plastic castle that sat in a gym with a hundred children. A decade and a half later I would be recalling these memories while dodging midtown taxis and hundred story shadows and staring at the sidewalk grafitti. While the people and the place I lived and worked with seemed alien, I felt more comfortable than my roomates who had arrived in New York City from rural towns or suburban neighborhoods. I would call myself an urban animal, and maybe ten years later an urbanist. During my first year in the city, I discovered army issue camoflauge. In my senior year, I would frequently find myself wearing black. 
	Although I grew up in the city, I spent fourteen years in two towns of differing sizes in the state of Oregon. Eugene continues to grow its downtown district, has a fairly low national average crime rate, and heavy sanitation and recycling programs. It has more pollen than carbon monoxide. Portland is surrounded by an urban growth boundary approaching my neighborhood at the edge of the county.  The Rose City has two large downtown districts, segregated by the Willamette River. The new above-ground train system creates an elliptical path from the airport to the Convention Center to the Pioneer Square westside downtown plan, several acres of parkland and commercial areas flush against residential waterfront property, whose center is also known as the “Living Room” of the Rose City. 
	After the fall semester of my third year, I decided to find an place to live outside the Manhattan borough. Since moving to Brooklyn, I’ve become increasingly aware of my racial background and its role in my academic and personal development. Like a blister on my foot I am aware of it in many places.  I believe I reluctant to use the race card more than my debit card. Some of these callouses loosens themselves at public institutions where we are are made to live with each other: libraries, train stations, cafeterias and certain high-density streets inside the village. I have been mugged once near a train station, and physically assaulted three times in the last three years in two boroughs. In each of these instances I am more aware of the issue of my race and the race(s) of my assailant.
	My grandmother feels acutely aware of the danger I seem to have encountered and this fear is part of her as much as she is a part of me. As a child, I had lived with her in Hong Kong and in Portland, across the west coast and southwestern states with my mother and aunt. Whenever we passed a black family, I felt my hand being tugged by my grandmother. Eventually I learned to avoid them by myself and am literally learning to walk a straight path. 
	I had already found it difficult to talk to someone my own age. I began to feel very early in my time in America as if I were not supposed to speak to certain people. This was one of my simpler, yet highly personal reasons for moving to a large cosmopolitan city. I hoped to learn to live with people that I had never spoken to before because I had been afraid. I also wanted to change my ideas about certain people I had grown up with by leaving them, and then forgetting them. I had heard somewhere that New York was a wonderful city to be alone in. 
	The life of an “urbanist” may be about cultivating a shared sense of survival. Urbanists choose to create city that attempts to accomodate all its citizens equally, and strives to give them room to assemble their own projects. However, any major metropolitan city must also face the complicated task of creating a culture of preservation inside a complicated process of distribution, since the city is increasingly connecting itself everyday to every other major city in the world. Urbanists have to think within the local social and economic spheres of their cities, which are tied to shifting networks of communication and access. They are roads that are static in their function yet remain elusive in their actual form. The culture of a major metropolitan city in the twenty-first century can only maintain a cosmopolitan tradition if it is ready to change with consistently emerging possibilities that accompany world events. The urbanist is one who is at home in a world of migration.
	Late in my second year of college I discovered that the  private university can claim at once to be a harbinger of truth, yet present itself as available only to some who can afford that truth. It was difficult to reconcile the fact that my ideas were a fortunate circumstance with those ideas themselves, since they were enveloped in idealistic, highly romantic terminology. It seemed that to starve and yet to live was to segregate myself from the gratuitous, sexiest and most intoxicating parts of life itself - I had been told that I was glamorizing poverty by desiring to believe its rawness was authenticity. Then, the most heartfelt words I discovered were those of Marx. His hatred of bourgeois decadence was a reflection of the contradictions I saw in my own privilege. Of its deeply irreconcilable amoralness and complicity.
	During my four years in the city, I made many close friends, many of who I believe share a way of life that is “urban.” I think we share the same dietary choices, mutual friends, and the same taste in books and music. I think we are trying to live and work in ways that conserve as much of the city’s resources. But we also share the same ideas about why the city fails severely to provide for the people that live in it and have been for much longer than we have. Living in any large city for a long period of time forces its people to watch and think about how it functions, and which or how many of those forces are making that person work and live in the fashion that he or she does. Urbanism, as a way of life, involves being conscious of the way that people live and how ones lifestyle affects others in the same environment. It is also a way of looking at the world through the eyes of the city. It must also be a way of breathing, eating, and sleeping among millions; it is thus an act of sharing.