[extropy-chat] Engineered Deaf Town

[Olga Bourlin]

I don't get this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/national/21deaf.html?hp&ex=1111467600&en=ecb24332e3f18d90&ei=5094&partner=homepage

March 21, 2005
As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges
By MONICA DAVEY

ALEM, S.D. - Standing in an empty field along a wind-swept highway, Marvin 
T. Miller, who is deaf, envisions the town he wants to create here: a place 
built around American Sign Language, where teachers in the new school will 
sign, the town council will hold its debates in sign language and restaurant 
workers will be required to know how to sign orders.

Nearly 100 families - with people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who can 
hear but just want to communicate in sign language - have already publicly 
declared their intention to live in Mr. Miller's village, to be called 
Laurent, after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of the deaf from the 1800's.

Planners, architects and future residents from various states and other 
countries are gathering at a camp center in South Dakota on Monday and 
through the week to draw detailed blueprints for the town, which could 
accommodate at least 2,500 people. Mr. Miller, who has been imagining this 
for years, intends to break ground by fall.

"Society isn't doing that great a job of, quote-unquote, integrating us," 
Mr. Miller, 33, said through an interpreter. "My children don't see role 
models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business 
owners. So we're setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique 
society."

While deaf enclaves, like the one that existed in Martha's Vineyard decades 
ago, have cropped up throughout the nation, this would be the first town 
expressly created for people who sign, its developers say. Even the 
location, in sparsely populated South Dakota, was selected with the intent 
of rapidly building political strength for the nation's millions of deaf and 
hard-of-hearing people, a group that has won few elected offices around the 
country.

But in the complicated political world of deaf culture, Laurent is an 
increasingly contentious idea. For some, like Mr. Miller; his wife, 
Jennifer, who is also deaf; and their four deaf children, it seems the 
simplest of wishes: to live in a place where they are fully engaged in 
day-to-day life. Others, however, particularly advocates of technologies 
that help deaf people use spoken language, wonder whether such a town would 
merely isolate and exclude the deaf more than ever.

"We think there is a greater benefit for people to be part of the whole 
world," said Todd Houston, executive director of the Alexander Graham Bell 
Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Washington. "I understand 
the desire to be around people like ourselves, and I don't have a problem 
with that, but I don't think it's very wise. This is a little bit of 
circling-the-wagons mentality, if you ask me."

Over the past 15 years, he said, it has become easier for the deaf and hard 
of hearing to grow up using spoken language, because of a steady rise in the 
use of cochlear implants, more early diagnoses and therapies for deaf 
children and efforts to place some deaf children in mainstream schools. That 
fact has set off intense political debate over what it means to be deaf and 
what mode of communication - signing or talking - the deaf should focus on.

Those who want to live in Laurent, though, say their intent is not 
exclusivity at all, but the inclusion of diverse people, especially those 
who do not have the luxury of communicating with speech. "We are not 
building a town for deaf people," said M. E. Barwacz, Mr. Miller's 
mother-in-law and his business partner in creating Laurent. "We are building 
a town for sign language users. And one of the biggest groups we expect to 
have here is hearing parents with deaf children."

Ms. Barwacz, who intends to live in Laurent, is not deaf. She has two 
daughters, one deaf and one not, and eight grandchildren, four of them deaf. 
Nationally, experts report that some 90 percent of deaf children are born to 
hearing parents, setting up a quandary, in some cases, about what language 
to use in a single household.

As early as the 1800's, deaf leaders debated the possibility of a "deaf 
state," said Gerard Buckley, an official at the National Technical Institute 
for the Deaf in Rochester. But the notion came and went. Elsewhere, because 
of proximity to schools and businesses tied to the deaf, large 
concentrations of deaf people have gathered in cities like Rochester; 
Washington; Olathe, Kan.; Frederick, Md.; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

The difference in Laurent, say some among the 92 families who have reserved 
spaces in the town from as far as London and Australia, is that every 
element of it would be designed with them in mind. The homes and businesses, 
they said, would incorporate glass and open space for easy visibility across 
wide distances. Fire and police services would be designed with more lights 
and fewer sirens. High-speed Internet connections would be available all 
over town, since the Internet and Video Relay Service have become vital 
modes of communication for deaf people. And any shops, businesses or 
restaurants would be required to be sign-language friendly.

Here in Salem, a dusty 125-year-old farming town of 1,300 three miles from 
the proposed site of Laurent, people seem unsure of what to make of the 
idea. "No one has ever come along and tried to start a town," said Joseph 
Kolbeck, the local barber.

Along the quiet main drag through town, Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz, who are 
originally from Michigan, recently opened a storefront in the old King Koin 
Laundromat to create and promote Laurent. They moved to Salem not long ago, 
choosing the area after surveying nearly the entire country looking at 
factors like population, climate and cost of land.

Some people here wonder how the proposed town of 2,500 would mesh with 
McCook County's 6,000 residents and its economy of corn, cows and pigs. 
Others say they doubt Laurent will ever become reality.

Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz have revealed little about the costs and their 
plans for financing Laurent. They say they are using family money, as well 
as some from a group of "angel investors," led by a man with a deaf daughter 
who wishes to remain anonymous. First Dakota National Bank is helping to 
secure financing, and the two have optioned 275 acres so far. They say they 
are spending about $300,000 for the planning work during the meetings that 
will end on Saturday. Those who have reserved spaces in Laurent will be 
expected to put down $1,000 deposits for condominiums and home lots within 
the next few months.

For many of those people - from states like California, Florida and New 
York - a move to prairie land in South Dakota (population 760,000) would 
seem to be an enormous culture shock. But they plan to start businesses like 
shops and restaurants, gas stations and hotels, and the benefits, many of 
them say, outweigh any concerns they have about the location.

Lawrence J. Brick, a retired school administrator from Philadelphia, said 
Laurent held attractions that most hearing people would struggle even to 
grasp: no longer having to shy away from the neighbors, fearing he could not 
communicate; no longer having to guess what a store clerk is saying about a 
price; no longer having to apologize for being deaf.

Although some people argue that Laurent might isolate deaf people, H-Dirksen 
L. Bauman, who directs the master's program in deaf studies at Gallaudet 
University, said the plans actually marked an important collaboration 
between the deaf and the hearing, one of a sort not always encouraged by the 
deaf community. This is especially significant, he said, as more hearing 
people are learning American Sign Language, now the fifth most-studied 
language on college campuses.

"Hearing people are not welcomed in deaf residential schools, in deaf 
clubs," Mr. Bauman said. "But there is no audiogram you will need to buy 
land in Laurent, South Dakota. There's simply a commitment to live in a 
visually centered environment that supports manual as opposed to spoken 
language."

But Dr. Michael Novak of Urbana, Ill., who has been performing cochlear 
implants since 1984, said he was convinced that the trend among the deaf was 
actually shifting toward therapies that could help the next generation of 
deaf people use spoken language.

"Communities like this have a real place for people who cannot or choose not 
to use the hearing technology," Dr. Novak said of Laurent. "But over time, 
that number will be reducing." He wonders then, he said, if the future of a 
notion like Laurent might fade away.

For his part, though, Mr. Miller said reports of the "death of sign language 
and deaf culture continue to be greatly exaggerated." Not everyone, he said, 
is eligible for or would even want to receive technologies like cochlear 
implants. "I do not want one for myself," he said. "I am very happy being 
deaf. To me, this is like asking a black or Asian person if he/she would 
take a pill to turn into a white person."
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