?Skid Row and Its Functions Skid Row is a district located in the zone of expectation of change near the Central Business District, according to what Professor Mitchell said in his lecture. The history of Skid Row in the United States starts in Seattle in 1865, and was originally the path along which timber workers skidded logs. “In cities, skid rows – entire districts of single-room occupancy hotels, flophouses, municipal lodging houses, labor agencies, cheap bars and cafes, missions, whorehouses, and other businesses and services geared toward poor and migratory workers – developed at the edges of downtowns” (Mitchel 2011, 937) Skid Row does not naturally exist, but the whole landscape is shaped by social relations, industrialization, and political movements. First, “any landscape is (or was) functional” (Mitchell 2007, 35), so does Skid Row. The first aspect of landscape as functional is that “landscape is a (highly complex) site of investment” (Mitchell 2007, 35). The point here is that the function of landscape has an exchange value, and more value it has, the more investment there will be. As the instance of Skid Row, the whole landscape is totally lack of exchange value, so that very limited resources is provided for people who lived there. The Second value of the landscape is that “it is a lived space and thus is crucial to the reproduction of labor power” (Mitchell 2007, 38). Labor power has different qualities, and because of this difference, it divides people from “different levels of state and private investment” (similar relation as the landscape value) (Mitchell 2007, 38). Easily reproducible workers, or cheap labor forces, are often low-skilled, racially, or ethnically marginalized workers who are not able to have the same working conditions, landscapes are those high-skilled or intelligent workers. Second, the place where Skid Row locates is interestingly enough in relation to the Central Bus