Blogging Social Difference: Week 10

My friends and I drove to the Greyhound station in Los Angeles to pick up my ticket. I noticed that the station is located in a "ghetto" area and the factory area of Los Angeles. Here is where the Greyhound station, the metro bus main station (Where all the metro buses are parked), American Apparel factory, and many other production and industries are. Just a few blocks away, we passed by about three blocks of homeless people on 6^th Street, just two blocks away from the factory areas. The homeless are just hanging out, sleeping, and sitting on the sidewalks with their carts and sleeping bags. From this observation, I am quite certain that this area of the city is faced  with poverty.

The homeless are on the sidewalks and I'm assuming they live there or are there
for the majority of the day. Buildings and homes are not well maintained. The
park on the bottom right is very small and it does not have a "nature" feel
to it because there is no place for a picnic and it is very small. It is also very
dirty and there are also homeless people sleeping there.

As I learned from the “Environmental Justice” article, lecture, and the Majora Carter video, the poor, "ghetto", and low income are located near the industrial and factory areas, where there is the most exposure to toxic waste and harmful sanitation, and very far from “nature,” meaning green grass and clean parks. Actually, there is the Gladys Park on 6^th Street and Towne, however this just occupies a small corner of the block, also it has pretty much no grass or picnic area; it only consists of a basketball court and once again, lots of homeless people are there sleeping and out and about. This area of the urban really supports the tendency of the low income and lower class being located near dirty air and environments. These areas look very unpleasant and their health I can imagine are damaged and at risk because they are always around factories that produce carbon dioxide and other air pollutants and toxins.

Factories and industries are located very close to the poor area,
the area where I see so many homeless.  Places such as here can be
very harmful to health.

In addition, because this area lacks scenery and landscapes related or resembling nature, it lacks the high class signifier, or it signifies that this area is where the poor are because, as discussed in lecture, nature such as parks, beaches, coasts, hills and mountains act as signifiers for high class social status and places that lack the resemblance of nature and contain exposure to toxins, and factory aspects are signifiers for the low class.

Another observation that supports environmental aspects of urban geography is the racial segregation. I noticed that many of these people are black; this can mean that there is a trend of race that plays into the location of where certain social groups are. Thus, race is another social difference that separates where people dwell in the urban. From my observations, blacks tend to be present near these factories and live in the unsanitary and unpleasant areas of Los Angeles, which means that race plays a role in geographic separation.

I conclude from this trip that the social differences of race and income or economic class play an important role in determining where one lives within a big urban city such as Los Angeles. There is a trend of low income blacks that are the ones to be near environmentally unfriendly, health risky and hazardous, and unattractive places. These places show the opposite of nature, which means that because they lack the high social status signifier, it becomes a low social class region.