OUR CREATIVE PROJECT
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As Gehl points out “[i]t's very important there's public life in public spaces. That means people from all walks of life will naturally meet in the streets, squares and parks of the city. So you can see what society you belong to. You can see your fellow citizens eye to eye going about daily life.” Indeed, every corner and pathway of the American urban spaces hold the multi-layered facets of every diverse culture; thus, giving them the opportunity to flourish. The voices of many unheard races, such as Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans, are channeled in many artistic pieces, which indicate the oppression and the marginalization they face in various urban spaces. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco are the points of reference for the aforementioned ethnic groups.
Namely, Chicago’s Pilsen, one of most colorful and vocal american neighborhoods, hosts more than 200 murals, which in most cases are carriers of the culture belonging to the Mexican Americans and the Chicanos and vocalise the racism and the gentrification as well as its earnest communal character.
Moving on, Los Angeles, one of the most multiracial counties in the United States, includes a significant number of Asian American population, especially Korean. Indeed,the multivalent murals in the neighborhood of Koreatown, specifically the mural of Dumbfoundead and the mural of Ava Gardner, raise questions of interracial discrimination and interracial conflict empowering simultaneously the Korean race.
Regarding the "Empire State of Mind" song, which is performed by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, it not only reflects the sociocultural background of the African American race in New York city but also highlights the racial discrimination and the systematic injustice they undergo by the dominant group; the hip-hop music genre constitutes a resistant form to their exploitation.
Moreover, in the American urban space of San Francisco the song of Scott McKenzie “San Francisco” highlights the ideology of hippie subculture, which constitutes a multilayered breakthrough in that era, as hippies movement and summer of love in San Francisco created a new reality and made San Francisco a cultural center of “flower children” and simultaneously made the last a major American symbol, which also implies segregation.
This creative project examines multiculturalism in relation to the Mexican American, Asian American, and African American minorities in the United States. As it has been illustrated above, the artistic discourses, whose vocal point is the urban context, including murals and songs, manifest the sociopolitical reality of these ethnic groups and constitute creative forms of opposition and resistance to the diachronic segregation and marginalization of these ‘subordinate groups’. As Toni Morrison has vocalised in the documentary film “The Pieces I Am”: “The people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft. That is something distorted about the psyche. It's a huge waste and it's a corruption and a distortion.”