A quote that interested me in Chapter 7 of Root Shock was “People who are outsiders to a place see it as a landscape.” Hence, this is why newcomers and tourists tend to care more about how a place that they visit looks compared to the social cohesion of the place. This quote connects to the subject of Chapter 8 of Root Shock, “Human Rights in the City”, which mentions why American urban planners want to remove “blight”: they do not wish to actually reduce poverty, but to make the poor unseen to visitors of a city. Such an aspect is common in tourism to places in the Caribbean, where people who vacation there want to be in an environment where they view as aesthetically pleasing without a poor person in sight. Another example, which is shown in Root Shock, is the reason why tourists to New York City go to Times Square rather than the South Bronx.

Fullilove also mentions how the role of aesthetics plays into the event of 9/11. There were a lot of social bonds among people after 9/11, which Fullilove viewed as positive. However, she believed that such bonds ended once the plan centered on building downtown buildings. The main problem, she believed, was that urban planners cared more about the way that 9/11 affected the landscape rather than people’s lives and loved ones. I would also have to agree with Fullilove. The problem with urban planning, and the city in general, is that more focus is on the buildings rather than on people, which is rather dehumanizing to me. What needs to be done is for city planning to focus on the needs of people rather than on the expectation of the city to “look good”.

A solution to that is to see cities as a social network of people, rather than beautiful cityscapes. Among tourism oriented New York City websites, the popular Facebook page “Humans of New York” is a breath of fresh air, since it focuses on people who live in New York City from all five boroughs of the city, rather than in just the richer areas and the tourist friendly spots in Manhattan. Although “Humans of New York” cannot solve social inequality within New York City, it is a start when it comes to viewing cities based upon its people rather than its buildings.