We are all familiar with the distinctive buzzing noise of a Duke Card when it unlocks a door. The gratifying “beep beep” sound signifies to us that we’ve been granted access to wherever we need to go to — whether it’s our dorm, classroom or the gym. We treat this admission as automatic, after all, why would Duke suddenly deny us access to the places we need to be?
Yet, this is what happened to me while working in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab at Grainger Hall. As my model was running on one of the desktops, I took a quick break to stretch my legs. However, when I tried to scan back into the room, my card set off the door alarm, meaning that I was denied access. This baffled me, as I use the GIS Lab frequently and successfully scanned into the room a few minutes earlier. What changed?
This silly mishap revealed to me a broader reality that I had taken for granted. As a student here, I felt a sense of ownership over the physical spaces I traverse, even if this notion is untrue from a strict legal standpoint. This is why every alumni weekend, there’s always that alum who asks you why you are sitting in their seat at the library, even if they haven’t stepped foot inside the building for decades. Being on the inside of the Duke Card access only door gave me a sense of power and superiority that I never realized was there until it was taken away from me.
In an increasingly digital world, our interactions with our physical surroundings still have a profound impact on who we are. Think about the last time when you randomly ran into one of your friends. Where were you? What time of day was it? Wherever it occurred, this interaction couldn’t have been possible without Duke. Duke had to decide to admit you both in the first place. Duke built and maintained the sidewalk you are standing on. Duke designed the class schedule in such a way that you both happened to be out and about at the same time. And this isn’t a bad thing — nice job Duke! But in a society where we pride ourselves in our individualism and free will, it’s important to acknowledge that most of our encounters are socially engineered.
Asserting that our existence is socially engineered is a bit bold, I’ll concede. Even if Duke controls the options, I decide how I want to play the game — that’s the beauty of college. For example, I can think of four different ways to walk between Gross Hall and Bostock Library. On each one of these routes, I’ll have a discrete probability of seeing certain people, based on the time of day and weather. Of course there’s some stochasticity involved, but by on large, we’re creatures of habit.
Why, then, do we choose to engage with the people we are close to? Surely it is not the result of a simple distribution of those we pass by the most on the quad. I believe that our social structures can be explained by the economic model of Tiebout sorting. In this analysis of suburban municipalities across America, economist Charles Tiebout posited that families chose which suburb to live based on their personal valuation of the goods and services that particular location provided. This results in the aggregation of like-minded residents in certain towns, even if on the surface two communities may appear quite similar.
At Duke, and in really any community, we engage in Tiebout sorting. We gravitate to people who share values with us, those whose “personal valuations” of the world align with ours. We are willing to defy spatial trends to be with these people, even if it means taking the bus all the way to Blue Light.
This ability to vote with our feet is a defining factor of the 21st century, where space-time compression has given us unprecedented mobility. 15% of Duke undergraduates are from North Carolina and 14% are international students. This wasn’t always the case, as the percentage of international students increased by 42% between 2012 and 2017.
Despite the geographic diversity of Duke students, why do I still feel at home here? The answer lies in the universal diffusion of shared values and interests. Our widespread access to information has allowed us to develop niche interests — passions that our friends back home may not relate to. But since Duke aggregates such a wide variety of people, we are bound to meet a few friends who are similar to us, even if we may seem quite dissimilar on the surface level.
While this spatial clustering of like-minded people may be great for us socially, it has a deleterious impact on our society. In his book “The Big Sort,” author Bill Bishop demonstrates how America has become more stratified in homogenous communities since the end of the 20th century. As a result, Americans spatially realigned themselves along social, economic and racial lines.
So, in an era where most of the world is just a few hours’ flight away, does location really matter? Apparently, yes, it still does matter. Just listen to the gripes of Duke students (who often hail from the world’s premier cities) about how dull and insufficient Durham is. When I told another attendee at an event in Washington D.C. that I was a Duke student, he replied, “Duke is a great school, it looks like a castle but it’s in the middle of nowhere.” Even though Duke is located in a vibrant metropolis of 2.1 million people, it is still imagined as a medieval castle perched on vast swaths of wilderness.
Even if it deviates from the norm, we can choose how we engage with our surroundings. However, most of us are too glued to our screens to fully comprehend this choice. We are shaped by our physical environment, but, as seen with Tiebout sorting, we can alter it too. This can be as simple as trying a new route to walk between your dorm and your classes. Or exploring a part of Durham you’ve never been to. These simple actions will expose us to new people and experiences that we may have never known existed before. Reclaiming authority over our spatial autonomy is the first step to seeing the world in a new light.
Aaron Seigle is a Trinity junior. His pieces typically run on alternate Fridays.
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