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The interplay of psychology, design, and politics in experiments with urban open space As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a broad array of projects in open spaces to affirm the value of city life. Mariana Mogilevich provides a fascinating history of a watershed moment when designers, government administrators, and residents sought to remake the city in the image of a diverse, free, and democratic society. New pedestrian malls, residential plazas, playgrounds in vacant lots, and parks on postindustrial waterfronts promised everyd...
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual cu...
“These first-rate essays provide a positive revaluation of [John Lindsay’s] mayoralty, a convincing defense of the progressive tradition he championed.” —Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of Gotham Summer in the City takes a clear look at John Lindsay’s tenure as mayor of New York City during the tumultuous 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious Great Society Program. Providing an even-handed reassessment of Lindsay’s legacy and the policies of the period, the essays in this volume skillfully dissect his kaleidoscope of progressive ideas and approach to leadership—all set in a perfect storm of huge demographic changes, growing fiscal stress, a...
From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people’s everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways.
Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture—large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a “declaration of independence” for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own. Ryan ...
An acclaimed history of Harlem’s journey from urban crisis to urban renaissance With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Young Harlem activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.
An essay collection exploring the board game’s relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space. Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place, Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of thirty-seven fascinating essays, s...
Intersecting with fan studies, TV and comics studies, queer, disability and feminist studies, as well as popular culture and media scholarship, this collection of essays is the first to offer critical examinations of Riverdale, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the broader Archie/Sabrina comics universe. Its authors interrogate these texts in an effort not only to make sense of their chaotic stories, but to understand our own ongoing fascination with their narratives. Contributing to a greater cultural conversation about representation in media, authors find unexpected value in the oftentimes ridiculous (mis)adventures of the Archie/Sabrina expanded universe.
How has Berlin’s urban landscape changed in its remarkable transformation from divided city to creative capital? Despite the monumental heritage and grand development projects, Berlin still conjures up images of urban fragmentation and vacant inner-city land. The book reveals the changing nature and complex politics of this open space. A rephotographing of sites between 2001 and 2016 shows how no man’s land has made way for new apartments and underground hangouts have changed into commercial hubs, but it also transports us to remaining pockets of urban wilderness and unexpected freedom right next to the city’s most iconic squares. The accompanying essays by noted urban thinkers explore this little-known but vital reserve—forcing us to reflect on our unrelenting efforts to chart the future of the city at large.
In examining the relationship between the spectacular, iconic and vibrant New York of the musical and the off-screen history and geography of the real city—this book explores how the city shaped the genre and equally how the genre shaped representations of the city. Shearer argues that while the musical was for many years a prime vehicle for the idealization of urban density, the transformation New York underwent after World War II constituted a major challenge to its representation. Including analysis of 42nd Street, Swing Time, Cover Girl, On the Town, The Band Wagon, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story and many other classic and little-known musicals—this book is an innovative study of the relationship between cinema and urban space.