Understanding the Code of the Street: Inner-City Life Explored
School
San Diego State University**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
P A 350
Subject
Arts & Humanities
Date
Dec 11, 2024
Pages
1
Uploaded by obisaac1
In the article titled “Code of the Street and published in New York by W.W. Norton, Professor Anderson examines the bi-cultures that operate within the African-American inner-city community. According to his work, the “decent” life involves the adherence to middle-class norms of behavior while the “street” life is characterized by boisterousness, lawlessness, violence, and disregard of the rights of others. The ghetto life (street life) involves behaviors of interpersonal violence and aggression that brings daily negativeburden on the lives of residents in the community, while spilling over occasionally into downtown and residential middle-class neighborhoods. Furthermore, the violence derives from the hard nature of life in the ghetto poor which involves lack of jobs, limited and dwindling basic public services, and stigmatization of race, high use of drugs, and drug trafficking, and lack of hope for the future. However, not all is lost; for every problem there exists a solution. Inner-city victims of the “street life” often find solace in the strong, loving, and decent family that is diehard followers of middle-class values. But, as Anderson states, such decency is often frustrated by “the code of the street” which is a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, particularly violence.Marxist geographer Henri Lefbvre coined the phrase “right to city” in 1968 asa rallying cry for progressive urban planners, the poor, and singular and groups who feel they have been excluded from every aspect of city life. While controversial at the time, “right to City” now exist in the principle of the United Nations New Urban Agenda. Harvey brought the phrase front and center in 2008 on the onset of the global financial crisis before young people campaigned at Zuccotti Park in New York and other locations like Egypt, Istanbul, and most recently during the Arab Spring. He argues that excluded protestors should strive for collective rights that would shape everything about the city, not just improvements in their personal status. Marxist geographer David Harvey revived and popularized the term forty years later in this 2008 article. To him, the fundamental behavior of capitalism is the recurrence of periodic financial crisis. Urbanization absorbed capital surpluses at every geographic scale by investing in housing, infrastructure, and services that benefit capitalists and the rich. This is followed by crises that eliminate the out value and create pains, often for the poor. Capitalist economies then experience crises that wipe out value and create a great deal of pain – mostly for the poor.
