As a Cultural worker based in the City of Tucson on the southside, I’m deeply connected with this topic due largely to the erasure and persistence of Dominant Culture. Dominant culture refers to the established set of norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors that are practiced by the most powerful group within a society, organization, or institution. It dictates what is considered "standard" or "normal," often marginalizing minority or subordinate cultures. Within the scope of Dominant Culture, there’s much room particularly concerned with the built environment and how the city around us is communicating the standards and norms of the current society. Since 2019 and even before, cities and urban policy have been transforming to fit a narrative that many of us may be familiar with but we aren’t able to see the definition in the way it’s being shaped around us, therefore entrapping us into confiding into the dominant culture narrative of the future. From tall buildings, long roads, car accidents every week, transportation department budgets are ramping into the billions yet roads are becoming more dangerous, many more issues involving the built environment. Can we preserve culture while urbanizing continues at this rate? Countries across the globe are facing massive and rapid urbanization and it’s costing some cultures and traditions of their pasts that constructed how people are in the present day. What does the future look like because of this? Outside the United States, some developers and others in the urbanizing industry are utilizing ideas to maintain their cultures by incorporating their natural environments into their new ideas, that way to tell a story past and present of a future space that people plan to hold in said space. In the United States, it’s quite different and difficult to understand the way in which developers are aiming to build, especially when you look at past developers like Robert Moses of New York City. "It is astounding that anyone in local elected or appointed office, anyone with capital and places to risk it, any cooperative group, any prudent conservative bank or loaning agency not compelled to do so, is willing to run the gauntlet and brave the brick bats, rotten eggs and dead cats on the way to slum clearance."Moses, R. (1986).

 

Most buildings look the same and most of them feel as though they serve the same purpose. In Tucson, Arizona, there's a stark contrast between what’s new and what’s old, what seems realistic for this region and what isn't based on what it is that they’ve built in the present day. “Only by adopting an explicitly historical perspective can such fundamental structure be revealed. The identification of shared properties in past and present systems has been facilitated by research traditions that define cities (and settlements more broadly) as networks of social interaction embedded in physical space.” (Ortman, SG et. al., 2020). This is where the idea of Critical Regionalism comes into play. This is where the idea of a Circular Economy comes into play. Critical regionalism is an architectural approach that counteracts the homogenization of modern, globalized design by rooting buildings in local context—climate, topography, and culture—while embracing modern technology. A circular economy is a systemic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses, society, and the environment by eliminating waste, circulating products and materials at their highest value, and regenerating natural systems. These ideas are foundations for something a little bit more open for those that see problems with what it is that corporations, developers and a lack of urban policy are creating. 

“Cultural Scholars have recently embraced the concept of critical regionalism as a theoretical construct particularly productive for the critique of tensions between local and global dimensions of regional life. Critical regionalism rejects the more passive or "unmarked" construction of locality Shuman, A. (1993) that has characterized regional or area studies of the past, which tend to essentialize the correlation between people, place, and culture. This is being referenced because of the idea that we, as inhabitants of a place, as people with culture are being affected by “larger-than-local forces” as we continue to live in our locality, within this region. Globalization is meant to be where it’s at currently, when corporations like Walmart started to outsource a lot of its production of goods, starting in 1984, with the almighty “Walmart Cheer”. A corporation like Walmart starts to push a more locally based company like Rubbermaid out with their “high” employee wages and extensive benefits and before you know it, we’re beginning to lose locality (Hornblower, S. (2014). Now, 30 years later, we’re beginning to see the overarching effects of globalization in our local communities, continuing with budget cuts and the closures of local community amenities and needs, such as the Quincie Douglas Center in Tucson (Rommel, N. (2026, April). Economic leaders at a “Breakfast with Economists” meeting in Tucson in 2024, talk about “a loss of about 2,000 jobs due to tariff policies and lingering post-pandemic headwinds” Foster, J. (2025, June 4) due to global trade and the International Monetary Fund being due to manufacturing jobs in Tucson that were lost. Largely due to the demand of globalization on a city with barely a foundation to help its local citizens, it’s losing stability to the growing demands of the world due to now growing tensions in trade restrictions. “Gradually, the dominant characters of this cityscape became homogenized uniform boxes strongly threatening social diversity and multiculturalism of the contemporary cities.” (Zahiri, Nima, et al., (2017). 

As you drive around Tucson, you can begin to see it. Since before the COVID pandemic, which shocked this city’s eyes open to the possibility of tragedy at such a large scale, the city has begun to change behind closed doors. “Citing a lack of transparency, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is contesting the Arizona Corporation Commission’s December 10, 2025 decision to authorize Tucson Electric Power’s (TEP)  private energy agreement with Humprey’s Peak Power LLC., and its affiliate Beale Infrastructure Group to power a hyperscale data center complex known as Project Blue.”Attorney General Kris Mayes Contests Utility Regulators Hasty Approval of Tucson Electric Power’s “Project Blue” Data Center Private Energy Agreement | Attorney General’s Office. (2026, January 5). Furthermore due to the COVID pandemic, this city has become infested with developers from other major cities looking to get their hands dirty with small town city money that could otherwise bolster their portfolios. For example, the high-rise on 4th ave that was built by a Minnesota developer for $60 million on a local development initiative called a “GPLET” (2022). This program is costing Tucsonans to foot the bill of development while the developer takes a bonus on funds that could otherwise benefit the city in which they pay for every day. 

Fortunately, there have been instances of locality being stripped from locals and prevention of regions being protected way before this became a prevalent issue here in Tucson. Jane Jacobs, who was a writer who migrated to Greenwich village in NYC, was a writer and advocate against urban renewal, now gentrification, against Robert Moses. A city municipal worker who wanted to destroy New York by pushing various freeways through Manhattan and other places such as the Bronx, and a creator of Public Housing, which often targeted minorities. “Jacobs advocated for mixed-use, human-scale streetscapes, looked at cities from the perspective of how people interact with each other in urban spaces, and argued persuasively against top-down urban renewal projects that did not take usability or human scale into account” (Goldberg, B. (2022, August 8).

 

 

Finally, as Jane Jacobs once faced a swine like Robert Moses and to a degree defeated him by preventing the freeway going through Manhattan, potentially changing NYC into a city that it isn’t today, we can do the same if we aim to envision what this city looks like as we continue to interact with it, like we do every day of our lives. "Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental."(Goldberg, B. (2022, August 8). The solution to this problem is more of a proposal rather than a concrete solution that is one-size fits all, we need to see our cities and how we want to tell the story of our past. Do we want big box stores crowding us from all angles with the shadows of their dimensions overcasting our city views? NYC is a great place to experience life but not every city is NYC and not everyone can live in NYC for the sake of how they’ve been acclimated to live. Do we want sprawling highways where commutes are several hours in advance to our 40-hour work weeks? Los Angeles is an amazing city by all measurements of culture and place but we aren’t Los Angeles. Do we want to understand the desert and its advantages or do we want to imitate other cities for the sake of saying “we’re like this city” and in turn destroy it? The idea of Pleasure of Culture is to get back to enjoying the SouthWestern way of life. There’s many similarities to the places that I’ve mentioned but there are also many differences. If we want to find a solution, we have to come up with one together.