Residents then asked the estate mananger about access for putting up notices.

His reply was that all notices now had to be vetted for suitability before being displayed. They had ordered noticeboards that could be opened with an allan key, but then realised that tenants could easily get hold of one to use themselves. So ones that needed keys were obtained. The Tenants Association Committee would have a key each, and the residents would have to take their notices to them for vetting.

Why? Because there had been a complaint that inappropriate notices had been put up on a noticeboard, but not on this estate.

He and the management team were doing what was best for everyone, and being proactive. After all, it might be that in the future someone would put up an inappropriate notice on one of the boards on our small estate. Even though this had never happened in the last 40 years.

It was pointed out to him that very few residents knew who the TA committee members were, or where to find them. Ah, he would put up notices on the new noticeboards with a list of committee members’ contact details.

But committee members never want their contact details made public. Had the TAs committees been asked if they wanted to waste their time vetting notices? No, said the estate manager. Some estates have no tenants association at all, so the noticeboards will sit there empty and unused.

We suspect that the ‘inappropriate notices’ were those put up by residents on one particular estate who set up a campaign against the landlord’s sales of flats to private owners.

And no, inappropriate notices is not all that our landlord has to worry about. They have a large number of ‘sink’ estates with crack dens, gangs that break into flats and rent them to illegal immigrants, ‘problem’ families, people who cannot cope at all with house cleaning so live with deep layers of cockroaches, people with mental health problems who sometimes become abusive or aggressive, and they have at least one estate where housing managers can only go with a police escort.

Have you read Ray Oldenburg’s ‘The Great Good Place’?

http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/roldenburg

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Following message as been pas’ed in:

I love Stollard, P’s picture of the arch that creates a sense of private space. There is such a construction in the town I live in and I have walked around it many times even though it would be faster and quite possible to walk through it. At one time I mustered the courage to take the shortcut through it, and I felt the eyes from every window, and also felt that I had no business being there unless I lived there or was visiting someone. It was almost like trespassing through some family’s living room. The design of the outdoor architecture said:
-This space is not part of the public city. People live here.

/Staffan Lincoln

Somewhat related question: If Blackwater is forced to leave Iraq, how will it be used in the U.S.?

More paranoid: What is the probability, if Democrats sweep everything in the 2008 election, that something will happen that will “cause” the Bush administration to declare martial law and take over the country?

“One of the most common, but mind-numbing, of these deterrents is the rapid Transit District’s new barrelshaped bus bench that offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting…”

This is from a book written in 1992 about Los Angeles, which has had police officials sitting on its various planning boards since the 1950′s, a trend begun by LAPD Chief William Parker (the book is City of Quartz by Mike Davis, Vintage Books, 1992). Los Angeles is one massive, long-term experiment in architectural control.

The book goes on:
“Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response:’ This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s.

“Public toilets, however, are the real Eastern Front of the Downtown war on the poor. Los Angeles, as a matter of deliberate policy, has fewer available public lavatories than any major North American city. On the advice of the LAPD (who actually sit on the design board of at least one major Downtown redevelopment project), the Community Redevelopment Agency bulldozed the remaining public toilet in Skid Row. Agency planners then agonized for months over whether to include a “free- standing public toilet” in their design for South Park. As CRA Chairman Jim Wood later admitted, the decision not to include the toilet was a “policy decision and not a design decision.” The CRA Downtown prefers the solution of “quasi-public rest- rooms”–meaning toilets in restaurants, art galleries and office buildings-which can be made available to tourists and office workers while being denied to vagrants and other unsuitables. The toiletless no-man’s-land east of Hill Street in Downtown is also barren of outside water sources for drinking or washing.”

I grew up in LA, and still visit sometimes, but for some reason it still doesn’t really feel particularly safe while I’m driving through much of it, and I don’t know how it would feel to WALK through most areas as no one, including me, is crazy enough to try that. I recall seeing people driving down the road with one window broken out and the alarm still blaring, I’ve seen someone get shot less than a stone’s throw away from where I sat (in my car), etc., so I don’t think being ‘seen’ deters much serious crime. Ask the neighbors after a shooting what they all saw, and I bet it’ll be the classic answer: “Nothing.” Did they hear the shots? “No.”

Quotes from book found at: http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history468/apr0902.htm