Quelle: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644008.2015.1009044#abstract?ai=z4&mi=3fqos0&af=R
This essay focuses on Alvin Coburn’s The Octopus, a photograph of Madison Square taken from atop the Met Life Tower in 1912. Working against the conventional interpretation of the image as a study in form, it approaches the work in relation to a public debate surrounding urbanization in Manhattan at the turn of the century. Read in this context, the image not only chronicles the anxieties of the skyscraper and its perceived threats to health, sociality, and class mobility but also discloses new modes of urban experience that strike a balance between competing forces within this dialogue. In this regard, the image is instructive for contemporary photography as it attempts to engage with the postindustrial city as subject.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/340?rss=1
Cities such as Kansas City, Missouri, have struggled to reinvent themselves and to attract new residents in order to revitalize their urban centers in the wake of over sixty years of urban sprawl and population contraction. City leaders since the early 1980s have focused on large-scale urban projects to attract convention and tourist dollars to spur urban revitalization. In many so-called rust belt cities, urban boosters have been slow to recognize and to capitalize on the pioneering role of artists and creative types in urban areas. City officials have also proved reluctant to discuss stereotypes about race that, in many cities, are at the heart of "urban problems." I use the film The Next American Dream to question the ways that the redevelopment of postindustrial cities is portrayed.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/245?rss=1
From images of major transport infrastructures and housing blocks, to drug rehabilitation centers, vacant lots, and abandoned industrial warehouses, the City of Detroit has been one of the most photographed of all cities since the 1940s. Although much has been written about the historical legacies of urban change in Detroit and beyond, far less is known about the photographic collections that participated in the redevelopment of Detroit since the postwar period. This article therefore seeks to chart and unravel photographic depictions of two cycles of decline and renaissance: urban renewal (1940s–1960s) and city-center renaissance (1970s–1990s). How photography participated in these two cycles of production, reproduction, consumption, and display of photographs will be analyzed by focusing on citywide groups such as the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Committee of Detroit (1940s), Mayor Coleman Young’s image-led campaigns produced by the Department of Public Information (1970–1994), and social documentary photographer Camilo José Vergara’s ruin park proposal (1995). In their search for a community of shared interest to manipulate how the Detroit citizen had to look at their city, the Citizens’ Council of Detroit, the author argues, embodies Vergara’s discourse of decline as well as Young’s renaissance vision. In sum, this article offers a history of an overlooked factor in the redevelopment of Detroit, namely the role played by and given to photographs, and as such contributes to the current debates on Detroit’s photographic image exemplified primarily by ruin porn.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/307?rss=1
With the rise of the automobile and the easy access to suburbia, there was a shift in American cities from accommodating and welcoming density to accommodating cars. With cities hollowed out, but able to accept thousands of parkers, a vibrant, multifaceted world of handsome buildings, varied activities, and casual encounters was lost. Innovative thinking regarding technology took a backseat to mimicking the ascendant suburban landscape. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, automotive access remains codified in finance, codes, and traditional thinking, hampering our now revitalizing urban environments. Practitioners, policy makers, and architects can once again create cities at once unique, welcoming, and at the forefront of innovative thinking. New technologies, smart phone applications, and entrepreneurial initiative are changing urban life. By systematizing these disparate innovations, the necessary elements for vibrant streetscapes and better urban form can be created.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/227?rss=1
Vacant land invites occupation, both by ruderal vegetation and spontaneous human intervention. This active engagement—taking the form of art installations, cultivated plots, or domestic appropriations—is often unplanned and temporary. Capable of existing outside of market forces, the projects are realized efficiently, but without long-term durability. Their short-term value is undeniable but so is their vulnerability. This is especially true of landscape projects on abandoned lands. The limitations of temporary projects are elaborated across diverse occupation types, including guerilla activities, pop-up projects, design collaborative work, and short-term land leases. The argument is structured around four main points. First, public space needs to be unregulated and diverse, not just on a temporary basis in leftover spaces. Second, landscape projects require time to develop to perform culturally and ecologically. Third, temporary projects can be placeholders that limit the need for long-term re-visioning. Finally, cities with large inventories of abandoned land require greater restructuring than the temporary can promote. The temporary functions well as programmatic overlay or an event landscape to activate an existing, clearly articulated, often vibrant, space rather than as a catalyst for systemic urban change in places of disinvestment.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/279?rss=1
This essay analyzes the influence higher education has had on the "creative economy" of New Bedford, Massachusetts, once one of the leading textile centers in the United States. In my analysis, I assess how New Bedford’s cultural and historical legacy informed artistic education in the city. In addition, I explore the impact that a single institution of higher education (the Swain School of Design) has had on New Bedford’s current cultural and economic revitalization.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/207?rss=1
This article summarizes the goal of this special issue of the Journal of Urban History (JUH). Offering a variety of perspectives—ranging from the role of impromptu artists to that of immigrants and small, independent communities of activists—it details unconventional solutions offered for reviving the economically declining postindustrial American city. Akin to the articles included in this volume, this essay emphasizes ways in which revitalization can take place without necessarily engaging the top–down missions of governmental agencies, large corporations, or costly urban planning. As this introduction demonstrates, most articles in this volume reflect on current and recent developments in major postindustrial American cities. As such, this issue of JUH hopes to offer fresh perspectives on the role of ad hoc agents, a topic rightly deserving of further attention in the field.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/147?rss=1
In the projects of the artist Theaster Gates, social change and transformation is strongly tied to an actual rebuilding and reactivation of vacant architectures across the South Side of Chicago. Opposed to Richard Florida’s analysis of the artist’s role in the processes of gentrification, in Gates’s model, the artist does not upvalue property in a decaying place only to then become victim to the outcome of this valorization, but the artist is a conscious and acting part in the very process himself with a designated long-term goal. Gates started acquiring abandoned houses at South Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’s Grand Crossing area in 2006, and since then included them into an artist-activated ecology. He inserts architectural remainders into works of art that travel around the world, and when sold to collectors, he reinvests the profits into the reconstruction of the buildings and acquisition of further ones. Especially through an involvement and practical reworking and repurposing of architectural structures, Gates is performing a break from a passive emotional attachment to a nostalgic image of the spaces of non-lived memory that is a prevailing trend in photography at the moment as in the works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for example. Gates’s active placemaking includes the investment into the materiality and poetics of space, communal dinners, performances, film screenings and an artist residency program with a focus on sustainable site-specific projects. In Dorchester Projects, Gates’s interests in a history of making, as well as the history of the city cumulate, but despite historical preferentiality, the places have a distinct atmosphere of nowness. He links his artistic practice and social agendas with architectural and aesthetic issues. Gates’s recycling, or also upcycling, an "investment into the care of things" and the permanence of built places is testifying to his interest "to move back and forth between the real, the gestural, and the economic," all contributing to his "art of staying."
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/193?rss=1
In dialogues among eight pairs of photographs, this piece aims to tell a distinct story about modernity’s industrial remains. These dialogues embody the workers’ dream of mass utopia that has come and gone. Images depicting Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities enter into conversation with photographs of Soviet industrial architecture.1 This juxtaposition of images and text serves the purpose of telling a story about the same thing: the rise and fall of empires, ones ideologically seemingly so different, yet similar in fate.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/2/294?rss=1
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