This chapter examines what spatial fixations that arose through designers' processes of problematizing and rendering technical excluded and how they fared once the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology became operational. It considers how forces that were excluded by educational reformers' fixations overflowed the project once it was launched. More specifically, it shows how fixation limited and distorted the ways that reformers imagined space. The chapter contrasts reformers' imaginings of connected but circumscribed “learning environments” with the ways that parents and caregivers helped construct and connect socially differentiated spaces for their children. It also explores racialized and classed geographies of New York City in relation to spatial fixations as well as the relationship between spatial fixations and school choice.
