New Eastern Europe | 6/2015
A sea of change
Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/neweastern/issue/2015-11-11.html
Fear, Commercialism, Reform, and Antebellum Tourism to New York City
Tourism to New York grew after the 1820s, during a period of incredible growth in the size of the city and its attendant problems. As the contrast between the glittering commercialism of Broadway and the rapidly worsening Five Points neighborhood increased, tourists became both witnesses to and subjects of the city’s best and worst aspects. A key role was played by Charles Dickens, whose 1842 visit to the city helped create a national sense of both the best and worst it had, and as the 1850s turned, the popular literature began presenting tourists as the inevitable victims of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. Tourism now became an engine fueling both the forces wanting to reform Five Points and as some of its best customers, and by the end of the decade, the nation’s image of New York had been set in the mind of Americans, creating preconceptions that continue to this day.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/6/1077?rss=1
City Stories: Place-Making Narratives in the Rise and Fall of Urban America
Scholarship on urban tourism has addressed the multiple ways in which visual images and narrative texts, especially impressions by outsiders, play a vital role in shaping perceptions of place in cities. These perceptions are shaped both by civic boosters and also by critics and reformers, highlighting the complex process by which city officials, journalists, travel writers, and photographers create and sell certain images of cities that have the potential to promote renewal, growth, and allure but just as often evoke decay, devastation, and decline. Consideration of the official scripts of urban revitalization alongside narratives of fear and ruin allows scholars to flesh out the complex process by which place-making happens and through which residents and toursist alike create their perceptions of urban life.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/6/1073?rss=1
Landscape in Motion: Nostalgia and Urban Redevelopment in Ed Ruscha’s Then & Now: Hollywood Boulevard, 1973-2004
Ed Ruscha’s photo book Then & Now: Hollywood Boulevard, 1973-2004 consists of two continuous photographic panoramas of the north and south sides of the eponymous street taken thirty years apart. The juxtaposition of these two time periods depicts a dramatic transformation of the neighborhood, a result of the ongoing Hollywood Redevelopment Project (HRP). From its inception in 1986, the HRP has enlisted a nostalgic image of the city during the heyday of the film industry to mobilize redevelopment efforts. At first glance, Then & Now seems complicit in the HRP’s nostalgic enterprise. However, Ruscha’s book provides a device for rethinking the city’s renewal and the historical narratives that drive it. "Reading" this unusual text disrupts our relationship to "now" and "then," problematizing nostalgia’s function as a condition of Hollywood’s revitalization and urban redevelopment more broadly.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/6/1052?rss=1