Week Fifteen Blog Entry: Urban Life

After college graduation, I moved to the city – Washington, DC, where I have resided for the past five years. I’ve seen tremendous changes in urban DC as the years pass, and I see my living experiences here reflected most accurately by the theory of urban ecology, which describe how cities grow in response to advantageous features of the environment. Washington, DC, a city established on the shore of the Potomac River, became ordered into “natural areas” through processes of competition, invasion, and succession (just like in biological ecology). I see how the expansions of suburbs like Arlington, Alexandria and Bethesda, contributed to the decay of inner city DC. Businesses and residents moved out of the central city to take advantage of lower tax rates, throwing DC into a cycle of deterioration, in which the more suburbia expands, the greater the problems faced by DC residents.

Property decayed in the District, and more of the population continued to leave. But in recent years there has been significant gentrification in the Logan Circle, H Street Corridor, NoMa, Columbia Heights and Petworth neighborhoods of DC as old vacant buildings are refurbished and put to new uses. In my Eckington (NoMa) neighborhood, a transitional neighborhood, I enjoy the sound of construction on most mornings as investors gut and renovate houses, I follow the restoration of an old firehouse down the street that will possibly be turned into a hip new restaurant, and I eagerly await a new H Street trolley which will bring people to the boutiques, restaurants, bars and businesses and revitalize the area. Wealthy people and young people are flooding into the District, seeking the arts and culture… and political careers (well, this is DC). And conversely, I see that most of my working-class work colleagues with families continue to move further and further out into the suburbs (Fredericksburg, Annapolis, Delaware) to take advantage of the lower-costs.

One of the most distinct characteristics I’ve noticed in DC, and in most large cities, is the segmentation of the neighborhoods. Just as the ecology theory describes, neighborhoods marked by close kinship and personal ties are actively created by city life. The residents of the city are able to develop connections with others who share similar backgrounds or interests. For example, my husband from Serbia, has made many new friends in DC also of Slavic background. One of his friends was from Bosnia and was a realtor here in DC. So we used him to find our new home. The neighborhood he knew the best was his own neighborhood, so he showed us the most amount of houses in that neighborhood, and we ended up buying our home in that neighborhood. Not coincidentally, a large number of Slavic people also reside in this neighborhood.