Category Archives : Reimagining the Urban – September 2013


Reimagining the Urban: Margaret Crawford

In the early 1990s, I started working with scholars, urban designers, photographers, and writers on a project exploring everyday urban life in Los Angeles. In 1999, we published Everyday Urbanism as a guide to investigating the “as-found” character of the city. We identified everyday urban space as a rich and complex public realm created by the multiplicities of daily experience– trips to supermarkets, the commute to work, journeys that included wide boulevards and mini-malls, luxurious stores and street vendors, manicured lawns and dilapidated public parks.

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Reimagining the Urban: Linda Haverty Rugg

During the last decade a new field has emerged that increasingly is referred to as the Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities research centers often originated either in literature departments, because of the ecocritical movement in English Literature and American Studies, or in history departments, where the field of environmental history emerged after c. 1980. Other contributors to this field have come from inherently interdisciplinary fields such as geography, the digital humanities, gender studies, anthropology, and the history of technology.

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Reimagining the Urban: Shannon Jackson

In cross-disciplinary gatherings at ARC, we have found it worth going over territory that we all think we know, to review the staples, the bread and butter of our fields, in order to expose blindspots and to jostle ourselves into new perspectives on the heretofore obvious. But should I really reflect on the term “public”? when so much ink has been spilled on this subject historically…and from so many quarters recently? For this particular session, I guess I think I will, especially because the term is one that links some elements of environmental planning to key questions in humanist debate and artistic practice. Teresa Caldeira and I have named our forthcoming course for the GUH project “City, Arts, and Public Spaces” partly because the domain of ‘public’ ‘space’ seems a clear area of overlap between our fields.

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Reimagining the Urban: Ava Roy

In my experience, one of the most unique and profound joys of working site-specifically is developing an intimate relationship with the elemental forces of the environment. While striving to build a coherent world and intricate structure (and to clearly tell the story of the play), within the sweeping scale of massive outdoor sites is challenging enough. The challenge is intensified by the completely unpredictable atmospheric input – while rehearsing and performing, we find ourselves in searing heat or bone-chilling damp cold, we face blasts of powerful winds off the Pacific, we are in turns shrouded in fog, then squinting into blazing sun…

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Reimagining the Urban: Teresa Caldeira

“Street art” is the umbrella expression to refer to several forms of intervention that use the streets as their domain. It covers not only visual productions such as graffiti and tagging, but also performances like skateboarding, parkour, and break dance. The literature on street art is extensive and framed by a reference to mainstream artistic production. “Is graffiti (or tagging, or skateboarding) art?” seems to be an unavoidable question addressed again and again and consistently answered affirmatively. In my research, this approach is secondary.

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Reimagining the Urban: Raquel Gutiérrez

Arriving in San Francisco, I am reminded that this city in large part is designed to the scale of the average human being, with humane commuting strategies that put Los Angeles to shame. But what makes the space here different is that there is less of it. Space that accommodates a multiplicity of households has already been spoken for but that doesn’t stop a rightfully entitled newly moneyed class from coming in and taking it. It makes an object like the Google Bus an easy receptacle to fill with collective fear and loathing. Never mind the fact that our lives are that much better because Google exists. Admit it or you can just e-mail me from your gmail accounts quietly. No one has to know how much you enjoyed playing the Moog when Google honored Bob Moog’s 78th birthday last year.

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Reimagining the Urban: Judy Nemzoff

I’m participating in an Americans for the Arts Creative Placemaking webinar series that defines creative placemaking as, “the intersection of when place making by design has art and creativity at the forefront.” This definition presumes that—by building partnerships and crafting policy that addresses defining places with outcomes that include creative, financial, and social success—you must also place creativity and art making in the hands of artists.

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Reimagining the Urban: Susan Schweik

Recently New York City’s official adoption of a new disability accessibility icon has gotten a lot of press: a dynamic figure in a wheelchair zooming through blue space, in sharp contrast to the familiar poky, static handicapped parking-lot sign. (See, for instance, http://boingboing.net/2013/05/25/new-york-city-adopts-new-inter.html.) What I personally have found more interesting, though, is the deliberately unofficial approach advocated by one of the icon’s original designers, artist and researcher Sara Hendren at Harvard’s graduate school of design. S

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