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Houston is the fourth largest city in the
USA. More than
being a squirming, overpopulated megalopolis like most other cities of
its size, it consists, in
fact, of vast acres of suburbia, at times interrupted by equally vast
acres of office ground, and crossed by millions of tons of concrete in
the form of motorways.
In general, everything is
built to fit cars. For more convenient car access, the city is divided
into different districts - museums, theatres, hospitals, and so on. On
the three or four lane streets, and on freeways running criss-cross over the city,
you can get anywhere you like. (Still, no matter how broad and extensive
they are, and no matter how much they are rebuilt, there is always Stau
in the rush hours.)
But one thing is for
certain: you don't really go to the center to do shopping.
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Houston's structure can be divided into three parts
- center, suburbia, malls.
In suburbia, humans dwell.
Many apartment complexes - the one I lived in, for instance - are
divided from the street by high fences and gates overlooked by security
guards. Even inside these complexes, there is a good assortment of locks
on the doors.
Since everyone is expected to have access to a car, suburbia is divided
into blocks where you live, and blocks where you buy stuff, so that you
take your car and drive down a few blocks to do your shopping.
But if you'd like to do
acquisitions in the type of stores that in normal countries (Whoops!
Some eurocentrism seems to have snuck into my lingo!) usually are to be
found in the center of the city, such as luxury and specialty stores,
you drive off to a mall outside of town - a collection of stores in a
complex, along with the usual (fast food-) restaurants, coffee shops and
enormous parking lots.
And what is in the center,
then?
In the center is the
Capital.
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| Gigantic
skyscrapers of glass and steel rise high above the ground. The
companies they house are more or less anonymous, but the
buildings are enough to show the world an impression of how
wealthy and successful they are.
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| Between the tall buildings
narrow one way streets creep forward, repeatedly clogged by the
seemingly never ceasing building activity. (The latter can also,
by bitter photographers like yours truly, be considered
over-active: I once had caught a fine view of the bizarrly
neo-gothic building of Bank of America
Center, only to discover a week later
that my camera had made interesting collages of
my pictures (like
the background of this page). When returning to the same place
for a remake, a building structure that was
being erected in front of Bank of America had crept so far up that it
blocked most of the view ...)
At
least one third of the buildings in the center consists of parking houses for
the employees. And to satisfy lunching desires, there is a wide
assortment of restaurants and coffee shops. Many of these are,
of course, fast food restaurants - the main reason for why 200
000 Americans need hospital treatment every day because of food
poisoning related inconvenience (four of them usually die),
because the hamburgers not very rarely literally contain shit.
(Read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation to in detail find
out, with fear-mixed fascination, how fast food is produced, why
it actually tastes good, and, last but not least, how chanceless
immigrant workers are virtually killed, only very
slowly, by the horrendous conditions at the
butcheries producing hamburger meat, and the utter absence of
worker's rights, the establishment of which is actively fought
against with the meanest of methods by the companies.)
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Sometimes, while squeezing
yourself between all those cars and all that concrete, you will
actually encounter something very strange. Patches of earth are
covered with grass, bushes and trees, along with some more or
less tasteless fountain construction. The case generally is that one or
another of the surrounding corporations has ... generously ...
provided a few square meters of recreational space for the
city's citizens. In these spaces it is, of course, prohibited to
litter, walk on the grass, or sleep. Special guards make sure no
inappropriate activity has to be reported.
The Mecom Fountain, with
Sam Houston looming in the background. The fountains were
probably neither funded by the
Middle East International Telecommunications Conference, nor
the German satellite communications company by the same name,
but perhaps more likely by the metal engineering company from
the US? Hmm ... They are all so anonymous ...
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| This
corporate sponsoring of recreation and culture is strikingly common in
this part of the world. In the Museum of Fine Arts, for
instance, there is a special section of the exhibition,
which consists of paintings donated by a selection of
big corporations. |
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Of
course, there are fairly large signs saying which
corporation has donated which piece. So, apparently the
museum visitor is expected to think, "Hmm, Shell
Oil Company is into 17th century painting! I think I'll
buy some of their stocks ..."
All this is actually
rather scary. When you're standing at the bus stop with
the rest of the bums who can't afford a car, and gaze up
at the palaces of glass and steel, where capitalists
deal with sums of money that are so enormous that they
are far too abstract for a mere mortal like yourself to
grasp, it makes you think.
What becomes of people
who sit up there in the sky, using scam deals to heap up
money for themselves; money that could save hundreds of thousands of lives if
it were used to, say, provide free contraception, sexual
education and AIDS medication in the "developing
countries"? |
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