Planning the Public Functions of Nineteenth-Century Athens: Setting the Priorities between Idealism and Practical Needs
When the capital of the newly founded Greek State was transferred to Athens in 1834, the former provincial city of the Ottoman Empire had no buildings suitable to house a European capital. Yet, providing it with them proved to be far more complicated than expected, because of the question which buildings should be given priority: those housing the most urgent practical needs of a modern European State, or those underlining the connection of modern Greece to the cultural supremacy of the ancient Greek world? That question led to a continuous wavering between each option, constant changes of plans, and many nonpractical decisions that delayed greatly the organization of Athens as a European capital in functional terms. The originality of the article lies in its relying mainly on unpublished archival sources that throw new light on the creation of modern Athens.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1065?rss=1
In Search of the „Human Scale“: Delimiting the Social in German and Swedish Urban Planning in the 1930s and 1940s
The article explores one of the most important tropes in twentieth-century urban planning discourses: the "human scale." Drawing from printed and archival sources from Sweden and Germany, it demonstrates how, in the 1930s and 1940s, this metaphor provided urban planning experts—architects, social scientists, and housing reformers—with an important epistemological framework: it helped them define the social in technical terms and thus substantiated ideas about the malleability of society by means of spatial intervention. In practice, in both countries, the human scale informed schemes for a decentralization and delimitation of the urban fabric. Neighborhood units or settlement cells, as they were called in Germany, were to correlate with—and thus reinforce—"organic" social entities: primary groups like families and small communities of neighbors. Planners were attempting to re-calibrate urban agglomerations to what they perceived as measurable, natural social entities. They were compiling anthropometric data, claiming that quantifiable dimensions like the "pram-pushing distance" were ideal criteria in delimiting the built environment. Such data even crossed borders between political systems as different as those of the Nazi-"Third Reich" and the social-democratic "People’s Home" in Sweden. Thus, notwithstanding the great differences regarding its political implication, analyzing the semantics of humanization in urban planning helps explain transnational efforts to "engineer" the social to overcome the disorder attributed to modernity itself.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1044?rss=1
Cops, Gangs, and Revolutionaries in 1960s Chicago: What Black Police Can Tell Us about Power
In late 1960s Chicago, radical black police officers opposed to police brutality created the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). This paper describes the political vision of the AAPL and that of the contemporaneous, path-breaking black television series Bird of the Iron Feather, which was inspired by the AAPL and created with AAPL members’ input. Both used their positions within white-dominated institutions to present black perspectives on white power. The AAPL and Bird also analyzed gangs, both black and white, as functional parts of a larger, white-dominated, urban "machine" political structure. Their analyses of structural racism, and their understanding of the diverse responses of black Americans living within such a system, uncovered the complexities of black urban life in the mid-twentieth century. Together, they stand as sophisticated expressions of a popular black power vision that eschewed romantic images of revolutionary resistance in favor of careful analysis of and resistance to personal and structural white violence.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1110?rss=1
Community Eludes the Architect? German Architect Planners, American Democracy, and the Question of Community Building in Transatlantic Perspective
This article focuses on the problematic relationship between planning experts and society on the basis of the careers of two German architect planners who relocated to the United States during the interwar period: Walter Curt Behrendt (1884-1945) and Oscar Stonorov (1905-1970). Their transatlantic careers highlight the cultural background that shaped planners’ focus on community building and let us trace how technical experts adapted their professional language and re-contextualized their concepts in the process of migration. Across national borders, these experts presented community life as an alternative to urban industrial modernity. Behrendt’s notion of government-backed planning clashed with the realities of the American sociopolitical system. Stonorov, however, developed a planning language focused on participation that was compatible with American democracy. After they had joined ranks in a transnational effort to deal with the consequences of modernization, technical experts like Behrendt and Stonorov re-negotiated their continued presence in all areas of the social in the 1940s and 1950s. This, too, happened in a transnational setting.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1029?rss=1