Cities and Cinema
Global Planning in New and Familiar Areas
“Maria full of Grace” displays a great amount of global planning. Since the movie was filmed in Columbia it shows how everything actually is there and what it is like. Most of the global planning issues in this movie concerned immigration, their cities and towns, and social networking in urban areas. At least half of the movie is filmed in a small town in Columbia, and a largely populated city in Columbia. The rest of the movie was filmed in New York. Neighborhoods in all three of these areas that were shown made clear what the differences are between living. This essay will go over global planning issues in neighborhoods, the peer pressure occurring, social networking, and the lack of family and social support. This movie presented three areas that were all different from each other in their own ways. All three of these cities/towns thrive off of money just like every other place in the world. The first place shown to us was the smaller town that Maria lives in. The main business here was a flower planation where a lot of the townspeople worked including Maria. All of the workers are most likely getting paid minimum wage and cant support their families while the company walks away with most of the money. A worker not being able to provide for themselves or their family is when the drugs come into play. When a high amount of money is thrown into conversation a lot can happen. Some people will do anything for
The film, The House I live In, opened my eyes to the severity of unfair law enforcement and the depths of the battle with war on drugs. Theoretically, the more people are being arrested for drugs, the cheaper, purer, and more available the drugs become. Making these arrests are not helping get the drugs off the streets, it is only opening up more opportunities for other people to pick up the business.
Many of the families in Kozol’s book live in central Manhattan in drug-infested buildings, falling apart from the brick in, whereas in earlier periods of New York’s history were fine hotels. One of such buildings is the Martinique Hotel, where Kozol afforded much of his time to the families that dwelled there, as referenced in his book. Those who inhabit the Martinique Hotel are symbolically affected by New York’s renown valor in their conscious, further placing them in the class as “less-fortunate” within a city that does not afford them many opportunities. Many homeless neighborhoods find themselves victim to substandard medical and education facilities. The families, as Kozol describes were shipped by the masses to communities that already suffer from the city’s highest rates of HIV, drug addiction, pediatric asthma and psychiatric illness (Kozol 11). There is the idea, as Kozol says, that the homes that these families find themselves in are “closed systems”, “where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply” (Kozol 8), whereas the people are detached from the rest of society, confined to the community all in itself. The families he works with are sectioned off by society because they live in poor areas and confined within a capitalistic economy, have nowhere to go. In a way, Kozol describes these areas as the capital of homeless people, surrounded by a city built for the wealthy, by
Financial Aspects: Rosa Lee has no real job. But she makes money with drug dealing and being a prostitute. With aspects of fulfilling her primary obligations, Rosa Lee has been commonly late in paying her bills. As a result, many services get cut off. Rosa is unable to manage her finances due to her addiction. She doesn’t know how to prioritize what’s important and what not. Rosa Lee puts her habit of hers and her children’s drug supply in front of the needs of food for everyone, or money for the utilities. “All thought the procedure(s) by which heroin addicts obtain their money has changed over the years, the process has not: Heroin addicts must still feed their “habit” every day” (Doweiko, 2012, p. 159).
They struggle at first to make it, but they do eventually. They get “turned on to drugs” again. After a traumatic sexual assault, they leave the area to open a store, which they then leave to go back to their families. Again, they say that they won’t do drugs. Everyone wants them to sell, but they try to resist. They end up doing drugs again.
Maria Full of Grace, written and directed by Joshua Marston, is a film portraying the Colombian drug trade. Marston being born in the U.S, includes some international socially fragile aspects within this film. He shows the globalization of the flower and drug trade, within Colombia. Incidentally showing the globalization of the film industry as well. As this film reaches towards a specific audience who are sentimental to the negative activities in the global south. Marston includes an unrealistic portrayal about immigrants in America. Plus, he depicts the U.S. as a safe haven for all those who struggle. Making Maria Full of Grace a perfect film to analyze, pointing out how Marston unsuccessfully does his job, and instead glorifies the
While reading Amazing Grace, one is unable to escape the seemingly endless tales of hardship and pain. The setting behind this gripping story is the South Bronx of New York City, with the main focus on the Mott Haven housing project and its surrounding neighborhood. Here black and Hispanic families try to cope with the disparity that surrounds them. Mott Haven is a place where children must place in the hallways of the building, because playing outside is to much of a risk. The building is filled with rats and cockroaches in the summer, and lacks heat and decent water in the winter. This picture of the "ghetto" is not one of hope, but one of fear. Even the hospitals servicing the neighborhoods
The book being reviewed in this papers is Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers by Scott Jacques and Richard Wright. This book is written on the context of 30 different individuals from a small location referenced as “Peachville” in Atlanta Georgia (Jacques & Wright 1). Each of these known individuals during their time in high school were selling drugs. Marijuana was the particular substance to be sold, but few dove into other illicit drugs including ecstasy, cocaine etc. (3). Generally speaking, the first questions that appears is what pushed these students to dive into the prospects of peddling and using drugs? Better yet, why continue to use them? The 7 chapters included in this book contain various stories of popularity and financial gains and losses along with the destruction of relationships.
Both Ernesto Galarza’s “Barrio Boy” and Joan Didion’s “Notes From a Native Daughter” write about Sacramento’s past. Both authors talk about Sacramento during two different time periods. Joan Didion talks about the mid-century and Ernesto Galarza talks about the early 20th century. Although both author’s perspective of Sacramento differs from era to era, there are differences in certain characteristics described by both authors. Galarza’s essay focuses on an immigrant point of view arriving into Sacramento versus Didion’s experiences as a native decedent of Sacramento. Joan Didion’s Sacramento is a very different place compared to Ernesto Galarza’s , for him it’s an
Residents who come from low income levels are more likely to agree that “Drug dealing can be a good way for people to raise themselves out of poverty” (Wallisch and Spence, 2006, p. 296). Although most residents are aware that drug trafficking is connected with corruption and violence, their economic deprivation has created community norms that tolerate the economic advantages brought by drug trafficking. Individuals who chose to be drug users are more aware of the availability of drugs and chose to live in neighborhoods of higher drug
Given the complexity of towns and cities, it is interesting to compare NSW legislation and planning instruments to other states within Australia, to discover ways to perhaps further improve the SILEP in NSW. This report will aim to help evaluate the implementation of the LEP Standard Instrument in comparison to other approaches to local plan making in Australia. The first section will look at the NSW local planning scheme for Leichhardt LGA. The second section the Victorian local planning scheme for Melbourne LGA as a comparison.
The two major public health achievements, over the past 200 years, surround the control of infectious diseases and advances in hygiene and sanitation. More specifically: immunizations through development of vaccines, safety in the areas of driving and in the workplace, ways to keep food safe by learning more about bacteria, better quality in drinking water including the addition of fluoride, healthcare for Moms, babies, children and families, the connections between tobacco and the hazardous results from its use, and drop in deaths from chronic illnesses such as heart disease and strokes (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013).
We learn from the book that the number of drug dealers has a correlation with the loss of jobs of East Harlem residents. Losing jobs prevents people from providing basic needs to themselves and their family. Most of the residents who live in El Barrio are Latino such as Porto Ricans, Mexicans, and Dominicans. Latina/os are a key population in which to study substance abuse. Given their levels of poverty, minority status, and residential concentration in areas with wide drug and alcohol distribution, Latina/os are considered at risk for substance abuse (Verissimo, Gee, Ford & Iguchi, 2014). As stated by Philippe, the main point of this book is not about substance abuse, it is about his first hand experiences with the culture and poverty of East Harlem. It is about the struggles that people there have to go through in order to survive in an extremely poor area of one of the riches city in the world..
Drug cartels, in reality, are just as bad as they appear on film. Authorities estimate that between eighteen and thirty-nine billion dollars are brought in from drug sales to the United States each year (Keefe). It is also estimated that the war on drugs has caused over 50,000 deaths in Mexico alone since 2006 (Keefe). Deaths are often overlooked because they are not compiled by thousands at once, but gradually over a large area. Other illegal activity such as kidnapping and oil theft have came about from the cartel (Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations: Source and Scope of the Violence). All three films, Miss Bala, Maria Full of Grace, and Traffic give similar accounts to the way the cartel takes people’s lives, only in different areas of the drug moving process.
The United States is not immune to the worldwide drug addiction epidemic. Drugs pour in from Mexico daily, then distributed to throughout the country. The economic crisis in America is creating an excuse for drug use (e.g., depression, hopelessness). This chemical fix not only creates problems for the addict, but the family and community as well. Every addict has an enabler, a person who makes the addiction possible through various venues of support (e.g., financial, denial). Addicts are only concerned with their next fix and will resort to any means to obtain it (e.g., theft, prostitution, pan-handling). Some have even resorted to extremely desperate measures; for example, murder for inheritance or life insurance proceeds.
Los Angeles was the first product off the assembly line of American urban planning. Turned on in the late 19th century, the city-making machine was fueled by an immense immigration of people who sought to create a new type of city out of the previously quaint pueblo. They also strove to craft the first major city developed primarily by Americans and outside of European archetypes. As a result, Los Angles is not only incredibly diverse, but also nearly impossible to define. Since it is a product of the American machine, understanding the community of Los Angeles becomes vital to understanding the United States. But to fully comprehend the present Los Angeles, one must look at the process that created it. Specifically, Los Angeles was