MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the 15th Century, the Coast Salish tribes used to build sharp, pointy boulder walls to protect their tribes from potential encroachers and invaders; with the ‘homeless spike’, corporations or governments send threatening, pre-emptive, defensive signals to the underdogs of society in the most barbaric manner. It appears, therefore, that in cases particularly of the homeless or other struggling communities, governments or classes with power exercise high levels of control over the meaning of a public space, delineating spaces based on arbitrary boundaries of social status. With these restrictions, we are beginning to see a change in the meaning of ‘a public’. We, the upper echelons of society, have become intimidated, afraid, and even resentful of the people we’ve left behind, who have now grown into the people that we’d like to forget about. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of guilt.