In this series of Juxtaposed, I remix West Coast Rap All-Stars' "We're All In The Same Gang" music video with the audio of John B Calhoun's research on social crowding and aggression. The video, which I first shared during my Hip Hop Architecture lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, details how the built environment influences behavior.
Violence in the black community, undoubtedly, is the result of careful architectural planning and social conditioning, not a consequence of "cultural behaviors" of black people. In this series titled Destruction by Design, a continuation of my Hip Hop Lyrics As Modernism's Post Occupancy Report I will share historical data exposing the root causes of violence and propose a cross disciplinary solution to this layered issue.
In this series of Juxtaposed, I remix West Coast Rap All-Stars' "We're All In The Same Gang" music video with the audio of John B Calhoun's research on social crowding and aggression. The video, which I first shared during my Hip Hop Architecture lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, exposes how the built environment influences behavior.
Calhoun studied the behavior of lab mice under conditions of overcrowding and controlled resources. People eventually made parallels between the activities of his study subjects to humans, some predicting that overcrowding was in the future for the human race, and based on his research, violence was an inevitable part of that future if we don't change the way we design our cities.
He coined the term behavioral sink, which he used to describe the abnormal behaviors brought on by the extreme densities which included, violence, sexual deviation, gang culture along with decreased reproductive and nurturing abilities.
In the song "We're All in The Same Gang", produced by Dr. Dre in 1990, featuring the top hip hop artists and rappers from the West Coast, Humpty from the group Digital Underground eludes to John B Calhoun's research during his verse below. After the lyrical reference the video overlays recordings of Calhoun's research over the imagery of the Same Gang music video.
I’m in a rage.
Oh Yea? Why is that G?
Because other races, they say we act like rats in a cage.
I tried to argue, but check it, every night in the news
We prove them suckers right and I got the blues
Juxtaposition of Hip Hop Culture and Urban Studies 1990 - Hip Hop Conglomerate West Coast All Stars' "Same Gang" 1954 - Ethologist JB Calhoun's "Rat Utopia" studied the sociological effects of high density living and overcrowding during which he coined the term "Behavioral Sink" to describe the effects of the environment on the behaviors of the inhabitants.