Applying Black Threat Theory,Urban Regime Theory,and Deracialization: The Memphis Mayoral Elections of 1991, 1995, and 1999

Abstract: Until 1991 Memphis was the only major US city with a majority‐black population that had not elected a black mayor. Various explanations, including in‐fighting and competition among black city leaders and citizen aversion to candidates who attempt cross‐racial appeals, have been offered to explain the lack of an elected black mayor of Memphis prior to 1991. We first investigate how Herenton overcame these electoral obstacles to become Memphis’ first elected black mayor in 1991, and then won reelection in two consecutive reelection attempts. We then apply Herenton's campaign strategy and the vote in these elections to several popular theories of voting and election strategy in urban elections—black‐threat theory, urban regime theory, and deracialization. Our findings point to the new trend of biracial coalitions in the urban setting and suggest the importance of reconsidering the traditional theories of racial politics, such as the black threat thesis.     

Opportunities and Constraints on Mayoral Behavior: A Historical‐Institutional Approach

Abstract A theoretical perspective that situates mayoral behavior within broader patterns of partisan competition is asserted here as a more satisfying explanatory framework for mayoral leadership than rival theories that focus on personality. Behavior is structured by the mayor's relationship toward the regime in power. Mayors are either affiliated or independent of the regime, and regimes are either strong or weak. Four leadership postures result, and case studies are used to demonstrate the robustness of the approach. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (1954–76) practiced reconstructive politics by modernizing the city's Democrat political machine. Atlanta mayor Andrew Young (1982–90) practiced the politics of articulation by upholding the commitments of the city's African‐American electoral coalition. New York City mayor David Dinkins (1990–93) practiced disjunctive politics when the liberal order to which he was faithful suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Finally, Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich (1977–79) practiced preemptive politics by challenging the robust regime of party regulars and bankers in his city with little success.     

BLACK CLERGY AND URBAN REGIMES: The Role of Atlanta's Concerned Black Clergy

ABSTRACT: This study examines the involvement of black ministers in urban regimes through a case study of Atlanta's Concerned Black Clergy organization. In the early years of black political leadership, the black clergy were promoters of racial solidarity, oftentimes against the interests of low income residents. With black political leadership secure, the clery emerged as frequent critics of development policies during Andrew Young's years as mayor. More recently, the Concerned Black Clergy have become active regime participants helping to influence policy decisions on behalf of the city's poorer citizens. Through their organizational efforts, the Concerned Black Clergy have become part of the process of regime change in the city.     

Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978–1981

Designed in 1968–1969 by Neave Brown, Camden's Alexandra Road scheme in London is one of the most architecturally celebrated social housing schemes in Britain. But the project overran on both time and budget and before it was completed Camden's councillors launched a public enquiry (1978–1981) to find out what had gone wrong. Behind this lay much broader political changes, with radically different remedies to the economic crisis of the 1970s proposed by hard left and new right. Drawing on the unpublished papers of the enquiry and interviews with the key figures involved, including Neave Brown, Ken Livingstone and John Mills, the paper explores how this change of political alignments played out in the Alexandra Road public enquiry. It shows how the councillors struggled, in vain, to find evidence that the architect was to blame for the overruns; how an outside body, the National Building Agency, was brought in to pursue the investigation; and how successive attempts to identify a scapegoat (including an actionable report which had to be destroyed) proved unsuccessful. It shows how finally the enquiry was presented with an unpalatable discovery – that primary responsibility for what had happened lay not so much with the officers as with the councillors themselves.     

The Egalitarian city: The restructuring of Amsterdam

Since the mid‐1970s, urban policy makers have responded to the pressures of fiscal crisis and unemployment by reducing expenditures and subsidizing business for the purpose of stimulating economic growth. The behaviour of urban governments largely corresponded with the argument of Paul Peterson that cities were forced to pursue economic growth at the expense of redistribution. Nevertheless, the response to economic forces, while generally in a market‐oriented direction, was not uniform within western cities. In particular, the Amsterdam municipality remains notable for its egalitarian policies when compared with London or New York. Housing policy has been a major instrument in maintaining the quality of life for the city's lower‐income population. Because subsidized housing units, as well as recipients of individual housing benefits, are scattered throughout the city, housing policy has sharply restricted spatial inequality of households by income. Moreover, the very large public subsidy involved in housing construction, by keeping rent levels low and thereby raising disposable income, has contributed substantially to popular welfare, mitigating class differentiation and thereby weakening resistance to residential integration of different income groups. This paper examines policies for physical and economic development in Amsterdam and their effect on social and spatial inequality. The conclusion briefly compares Amsterdam's trajectory with that of London and New York, then finally attempts to explain the continuing differences.     

Squatting Geometries - Guerilla Barcelona: Technological Appropriations of the Over-Planned City

In the 1980s, Barcelona became the darling of urban regeneration. Its mayor and city authorities gained awards and recognition the world over. However, 111 architects José Luis Echeverría Manau, Jordi Mansilla Ortoneda and Jorge Perea Solano depict a very different, more sinister view of the city's development, in which the metropolis has been reshaped to serve private rather than civic interests. They explain how subversive citizens' groups are hitting back and realising their collective power through the strategic, yet often spontaneous use of portable communication and remote-sensing technologies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regeneration for All Generations: The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Kathryn Firth , Chief of Design at the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), and Manisha Patel , a director at PRP Architects, describe how the London 2012 bid's promise to promote wellbeing and social inclusion in the Stratford area of East London is now being borne out in urban design and housing that meet ‘the evolving needs and desires of people throughout their lifetimes’. A key scheme is PRP Architects' design for multi-generation houses at Chobham Manor, on the eastern side of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.     

Gendering the right to housing in the city: Homeless female lone parents in post-Olympics,austerity East London

This paper assesses how gender, housing, austerity and the right to the city inter-relate with reference to female lone parents from East London, the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. In so doing, the paper draws upon qualitative research undertaken with lone parent mothers living in temporary accommodation. The women's housing experiences are embedded within a deepening of neoliberal welfare cutbacks and restructuring under what Peck (2012) has called ‘austerity urbanism’. Although the mother's lives are based in East London where they have extended family and where many of them grew up, they have either been moved, or face the prospect of being moved, out of the area and even beyond the city limits into suburban South East England. Rather than basking in the much trumpeted 2012 Games regeneration ‘legacy’, these women's right to live in East London, close to their support networks, is being eroded.     

Teaching Hazards Mitigation

Abstract

This article examines the formation, activities, and significance of a group dubbed the “London Conceptualists” by Peter Cook that were students of Bernard Tschumi at the Architectural Association School of Architecture during the mid-1970s. Through RoseLee Goldberg, director of the Royal College of Art, the students were introduced to theories of performance along with radical experiments in performance art. Goldberg's conception of space as an arena for the realization of theory goaded the London Conceptualists away from writing and drawing toward installations and performance in disused buildings. This article situates their activities in London in the late 1970s and analyzes their relationship to other performance art practices and to conceptual architecture.     

How website users segment a city: The geography of housing search in London

This paper explores spatial patterns of housing search in London, using data generated by users of the UK's most popular real estate portal. By focusing on the variable geographies of ‘search extent’, it attempts to make a contribution to a long line of studies focused on understanding the fragmented geography of metropolitan housing markets. It also builds upon more recent work in economics on the utility of user-generated search data. After introducing our approach, we discuss the background to housing search and the wider emergence of ‘search’ as an object of study. We then provide further details on the data and methodology before exploring the spatial and sectoral characteristics of search in London. The results suggest that there is much to be gained by incorporating search studies into housing market analysis and that there is significant potential for future work in this area.     

Complexities

This essay considers the interaction of architectural theory and recent scientific developments in complexity theory and the study of self-organising systems, beginning with a reading of biologist Stuart Kauffman's popular exposition of his own work and that of others in the field in At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity . Kauffman's book is seen to rehearse an undertheorised notion of a cosmic 'home' newly identified for humanity by science, arguing that evolutionary processes - including the origin of life itself - previously thought to be unimaginably unlikely or arbitrary are now understood as probable effects of the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos. Significantly, Kauffman repeatedly extends his project into other aspects of human endeavour, including technology and society. Making no claims regarding the science itself, this essay argues that the nostalgia for the 'home' made explicit in Kauffman's work renders such attempts at generalising complexity theory, potentially problematic. Kauffman, for example, indulges in a project of uncritical domestication which has its own history within architectural discourse, including Christopher Alexander's attempts to translate earlier discourse on self-organising systems into a comparably restorative architectural formula in the face of an increasingly technologised- and 'complex'- lifeworld. The figure of the cybernetic black box and a fictional 'black cloud' - both contemporaneous with modernist efforts to unite architecture and science- are introduced as complementary materialisations of fully integrated 'communicative organisms' postulated by cybernetics against a background of noise, confusion, and information overload. The essay concludes by proposing that these latter effects be theorised as constitutively unassimilable into any and all universalising gestures of integration and domestication, thereby holding architecture open to the full implications of discourses outside of itself, and vice versa.     

Contemporary Architecture Practice: Samsung Raemian Housing Masterplan,Haan River,Seoul, Korea

In Seoul, the relentless uniformity of new speculative housing developments is such that it caused the mayor to intervene in 2009 by passing a law requiring differentiation. Hina Jamelle and Ali Rahim of Contemporary Architecture Practice (CAP) in New York describe the research and design work that they have undertaken for Samsung, Korea's largest construction company, to develop a cost-effective and highly nuanced masterplan that embraces variation.     

From cockpit to domestic interior: the Great War and the architecture of Wells Coates

This paper considers the effect that military service in the First World War had on the approach to design and practice that the architect Wells Wintemute Coates (1895–1958) developed from c. 1928 onwards. It argues that his experience in the Canadian Field Artillery, and more especially as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, influenced his design praxis and embedded in him a fundamental conception of architecture as a set of tools (framework, space, equipment), centred around the body of the inhabitant, and designed to facilitate their daily life. His early familiarity with aircraft, which were manufactured from the newest of materials such as plywood and aluminium, also left him with an abiding concern to use the most up-to-date materials in his designs and to develop an appropriate form of aesthetic expression for them. The article explores the background to his approach, and how it was enacted in designs at 1, Kensington Palace Gardens, London (1932), Lawn Road Flats, London (1934) and in the studios he designed for the BBC's Broadcasting House, London, in 1932. It concludes by considering how wartime experience also affected Coates's understanding of the persona of the professional architect.     

Drawing into the Cloud

Architectural designer, maker and researcher Birgir Örn Jónsson describes Islands of Vision, a speculative design project that he developed while in Unit 23 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Acknowledging the predominance of the image and the underutilisation of the full range of visual experience in contemporary life, Jónsson set out to explore the entire field of vision, reasserting the periphery ‘as a rich and dynamic mode of sensation’. With the aid of ScanLAB Projects and their 3D point cloud scanner, Jónsson scanned the project's site at Lee Valley Park, East London.     

CITY GOVERNMENT IN PLOCK An Emerging Urban Regime in Poland?

ABSTRACT: While most academic inquiry has focused on the new national government in postsocialist Poland, much of the responsibility for establishing democratic institutions and practices and a market economy has been delegated by Parliament (Sejm) to the local level. This has placed extreme stress on the local government arrangement. This study does two things: It examines Sejm's 1990 local government system as implemented in the city of Block and reveals a fractionated structure devoid of important executive authority. It also demonstrates how, in pursuing the city council's growth mandate, the mayor landed a Western clothing manufacturing plant in Plock and, in so doing, established business community linkages which contain key elements of an emerging urban regime.     

Mobilising opposition: The campaign against housing action trusts in Tower Hamlets

This paper examines tenant opposition to the British government's plans for Housing Action Trusts (HATs), using material drawn from a case study of the tenants' anti‐HAT campaign in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. After examining the HAT plans, the reasons for tenant objections to the privatisation of their council estates are explained. The political discourse of the anti‐HAT campaign is examined in order to assess the strategies by which support amongst tenants on both the affected estates, and in the borough as a whole, was mobilised. Strategies of resistance to the HATs were negotiated within the campaign through a constant process of discussion and debate about the purposes of the campaign and the construction of arguments against the policy. Central themes to emerge included a justification of the principles behind the provision of council housing; parallels that could be drawn between the HATs and the London Docklands Development Corporation; the notion that only tenant power could defeat the HATS; and arguments linking local experiences of the ‘housing crisis’ to the HATs and the government's housing policies more generally. The experience of this campaign underlines the necessity for potential divisions in such campaigns to be minimised in order to mobilise support and achieve their objectives.     

After a photograph,before photography (takes command)

The best part of a century separates photography's public unveiling in 1839 and its predominance in architectural representation in the first decades of the 1900s. In the intervening decades, as photography laboured to find its place within architecture's representational economy, photographs frequently made their way into print as engravings. Often bearing the caption ‘after a photograph’, such remediated images challenged the ontological distinction between drawings and photographs. Whilst photographs were understood—at least to a certain extent—to be unmediated objects, they required multiple remediations not only to become reproducible in print but also in order to live up to their promise. Engravings from photographs transmitted photography’s supposed guarantee of facticity whilst correcting its perceived flaws; in so doing, they contributed to the discursive construction of photographic objectivity—in another medium.

Drawing on a wide range of examples from British and French publications, including popular magazines such as the Illustrated London News and professional journals such as the Builder and the Revue générale, this article argues that by studying engravings made from photographs—with their numerous additions and omissions in the mediatory process—we are better able to understand photography's appeal to architects as a medium than we would be by merely studying photographs. These constructions of idealised photographic images in another medium challenge myths of technological progress, myths that mask the persistent continuity of existing economies of image making. Whilst photography changed the expectation of what a truthful, accurate and useful image should be, extant means were crucial to meeting this new standard.     

FOLLOWING THE MONEY: THE INFLUENCE OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM IN THE 2011 CHICAGO MAYORAL ELECTION

In this research we study the effect of recently enacted campaign contribution limits in Illinois via an examination of the 2011 Chicago mayoral election. Because contribution limits for state and local campaigns were implemented in the middle of the race for mayor we are uniquely positioned to test the efficacy of the new law. In theory we expect contribution limits to cause candidates to rely on more contributors making smaller donations. Our results indicate that the reform measure did not prompt candidates to broaden their fundraising base, and only when Rahm Emanuel's campaign is considered alongside his opponents’ did the fundraising law reduce average contributions. In a concluding section we address the issue of whether the contribution limits established under the law are too high to produce meaningful reform.     

Reinvigorating Childhood

Howard Watson is uplifted by the ‘brave, graceful subtlety’ of Caruso St John's redevelopment of the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in east London. He finds the pared-down spaces of the interior surprisingly in accord with the original Victorian structure, drawing their inspiration from ‘the regimented order of grand Victorian museology’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE BURLINGTON COMMUNITY LAND TRUST: A Socialist Approach to Affordable Housing?

ABSTRACT: Shortly after Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, Bernard Sanders, a socialist, became mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The Burlington Community Land Trust (BCLT), one of many policy initiatives under the Sanders administration, is a nonprofit corporation which makes housing affordable for low and moderate income people. This article gives a brief history of the evolution of the community land trust model and a detailed analysis of the operation of the BCLT.