Dyn-o-Mite Fiends

In wars of revolution, monuments become one of the most likely targets. Weatherman Underground's repeated bombing of Chicago's Haymarket police statue in 1969 and 1970, despite its evocation of the Haymarket incident—a landmark event in the history of Chicago and national labor politics—has largely been a footnote to the more consequential violence of the late 1960s. Instead, we argue that the spatial politics surrounding Weatherman's Haymarket police statue bombings highlight a critical historical juncture in an ongoing tension between the enforcement of social stability and the promises of democracy in the United States.     

Meaning of Functionalism

Abstract

This study explores the recent spatial politics of John F. Kennedy Plaza, “Love Park”—a piece of Philadelphia's mid-1960s Penn Center redevelopments. By the turn of the century, Love Park had become a center of a growing international skateboard culture, appearing widely in magazines and videos and on ESPN. In 2002, the city redesigned the park in order to deter the skateboarders, to the vocal protests of a broad-based coalition that included Edmund Bacon and over half the city council members. Through a review of city planning documents, local newspaper reportage, and personal interviews, I argue that the Love Park debates illustrate the extent to which “bohemian” or “countercultural” lifestyles are becoming institutionalized as instruments of urban development.     

Beyond designer diversity: Planners,public space and a critical politics of difference

Abstract

This article is concerned with the connection between the planning of public space, social justice and the politics of difference. I argue that, to remedy injustice in public spaces, planning must be informed by a critical politics of difference, which can distinguish between various kinds of social difference. The article outlines some important dimensions of a critical politics of difference with reference to three recent conflicts in Australian public spaces: over graffiti, a women's pool and the policing of public spaces in Perth.     

CANADIAN URBAN POLITICS: ANOTHER “BLACK HOLE”?

ABSTRACT: This article supplements and enriches Judd's and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe's controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholarship is equally isolated. Yet for the most part, the underlying causes of this predicament differ greatly from the U.S. experience. We offer three interpretations—one institutional, one epistemological, and one ontological—to explain the marginality of Canadian urban political science in relation to both mainstream Canadian political science and American urban politics. First, the growth of Canadian urban political science has been inhibited not because there are too few interested scholars, but rather because interested faculty are so thinly dispersed across the country's academic institutions. Second, unlike the American experience, the historical development of Canadian political science as a discipline has led it to focus on national‐level issues at the expense of local and urban politics. Finally, Canadian cities have developed differently from American cities in important respects, again leading Canadian scholars to privilege the national over the local.     

Beautiful and efficacious statues: magic,commodities, agency and the production of sacred objects in popular religion in vietnam

ABSTRACT

In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the radical suggestion that people commonly abduct agency—acts of thought, will or intention—to things and suggests that the relationship between people and things be studied in the manner that anthropologists analyze other kinds of human relationships. In Gell's terms, the relationship between people and temple images, as sacred objects, follows the “the rules laid down for idols as co-present others.” We will explore how one such a relationship fares in the accelerated market economy of Vietnam where workshops have rationalized the production of “idols,” wooden temple statues, making them more like commodities and where a global market in Asian antiquities encourages theft. Tim Ingold critiques studies of “agency” and “materiality” for too often ignoring the tangible materials and methods of production, but we suggest that in the marketplace for sacred objects, attention to both object agency and artisanal process can be mutually enriching. To do this, we first describe how popular religion in Vietnam renders statues as animated, sacred and agentive and how devotees experience and describe statue agency in and through their own relationships with divine images. We then show how production methods are implicated in the creation of agentive images and consider how these understandings and processes have and have not been compromised since the opening and acceleration of the market from the late 1980s. We argue that a sophisticated market permits a hierarchy of value and a range of consumer choice in the production and consumption of sacred objects.     

Reading the Phone Book: Cultural landscape myths in public art

Representations provide an accessible and challenging means of investigating the cultural landscape. While on the one hand images can be read as simple depictions or denotations of landscape, on the other they are rich in meaning, encapsulating a community's idealized vision of itself. The way in which a particular body of popular art—New Zealand's telephone book covers—conveys both 'real' and 'imagined' views of landscape is explored. These images privilege certain ideas about identity, with the selective visual language expressing a range of myths about the relationships between culture and landscape. The populist nature of these works holds a mirror up to society's values, and at the same time projects these ideals onto society, through the high public profile of the images.     

Disegno

Abstract

This essay explores the premise that thinking by drawing—thinking through the crafting of the disegno—is the primary way that architects extend their understandings of architecture. It suggests that drawing is an architect's unique mode of research, inquiry, and is the site for his/her most crucial speculations and constructions. Douglas Darden's drawings are speculative architectural fantasies that demonstrate this argument.     

“Watchful Wandering”

Abstract

Through close readings of John Ruskin's notebooks and diaries (related to The Stones of Venice) and the city itself, this paper explores his “watchful wandering”—as he characterized it—as a mode of urban experience and analysis, and that connected vision wherein the concrete fragment emblematizes the whole. Within a long history of ambulatory urban contemplation and journeyings, the paper locates Ruskin at the cusp of the pre- and early modern, exposing thereby a tension between the ethical and the aesthetic; between Ruskin's threefold vision—imbricating the romantic, scientific, and symbolic—and the blasé detachment of the urban flâneur.     

On Teaching the History of Architecture

Abstract

Following successful 1970s efforts to save Miami Beach's Art Deco district, a preservation movement focusing on the recent past has grown nationally—championing everything from suburban subdivisions to civil rights sites. This article explores that controversial movement's efforts—including its (and its opposition's) motivations and ideologies. Proponents use broader definitions of history and significance than preservationists used previously—with age, aesthetics, and pedigree no longer crucial, instead emphasizing sociocultural context. As they fight traditional conceptualizations, deal with divisive sites, and often work without benefiting from (age-specific) preservation laws, activists face strong resistance. Nonetheless, the movement has increased in size, strength, and successes.     

Cullinan Hall: A Window on Modern Houston

Abstract

Cullinan Hall, an addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, demonstrates how technology was transformed through social construction. The construction technology embedded in Mies's architectural practices became a symbol that materialized a cultural politics in Houston in the 1950s. It provided a segment of the city's elite with an identity as they sought to assert cultural authority. It was constitutive of exhilirating spaces that supported emancipatory modernist narratives, but also sustained interior narratives that exerted a contradictory appeal.     

The religion of the mithras cult in the roman empire mysteries of the unconquered sun Beck,Roger

ABSTRACT

For most of its history, candomblé was a marginal and persecuted spirit possession cult. From the 1920s onward, however, the cult evolved into the “trademark” of Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil. The color white—a spotless and impeccable white—has come to dominate the public face of the cult: evoking positive connotations such as cleanliness and purity, the color helped to portray candomblé as the splendid cultural heritage of the Bahian state as well as a respectable African religion. However, the “politics of white” has always been intersected by a “poetics of white,” as Bahian artists, writers, and other image producers sought to destabilize the condoned meanings of white. Hinting at that which is absent from the impeccable surfaces of candomblé's public appearance, this “poetics of white” produced a layered public understanding of the cult. As people engage in speculations over the “true” candomblé that lies hidden behind its public façade, claims to be “in the know” reconfigure the notion of cultural capital, and new standards of belonging come into being.     

Exhibition Review

Abstract

Point—Counterpoint is an installation at Eastern State Penitentiary National Historic Landmark in Philadelphia. Operational from 1830 to 1971, the prison is now a museum. One of the largest and most technologically advanced buildings of its day, Eastern State “linked solitude with moral and vocational instruction, exemplified the Pennsylvania System of penology, and became a model for over 300 prisons worldwide.”¹ This installation initiates a conversation with the prison's architect, John Haviland (1792–1852), about Eastern State's influential role in establishing an architectural type—the radial prison.     

Salt Chapel

Abstract

The Salt Chapel invokes the sacral potentiality latent in the natural landscape of Utah's Great Salt Lake Basin. This theoretical project parses that landscape's phenomena, advocating for the singularity of the essences that inhere within a severe terrain composed of salt flats and shallows. A contemplative spatial enclosure, the Salt Chapel is dedicated to salt—nature's most ubiquitous, fragile, and “humble” of mineralogical crystals. As a mobile structure, the chapel celebrates the distinct character of the lake's endlessly shifting shoreline of super-saline water.     

The Cultural Politics of Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929)

Abstract

The early twentieth-century invention of the airplane brought on a cultural euphoria that influenced the works and writings of urbanists, architects, artists, and science-fiction writers during the 1920s and 1930s. Le Corbusier's urban design for Rio de Janeiro—which he sketched, so he claimed, from an airplane—offers a visual basis to study how the aesthetic experience of flight was translated spatially, visually, and politically into his design of the future city. The polemics informing Le Corbusier's aerial “discovery” of South American geography revealed that there was a new empowerment in the act of looking from above, and that the spatial characteristics of his subsequent design interventions evoked that empowerment.     

The Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the “Changes” through Stalin's Palace in Warsaw,Poland

Abstract

Joseph Stalin's Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, is a representative architectural structure, whose diverse and divergent readings and interpretations elicit larger historic and cultural contexts of pre- and post-1989 developments in Eastern Europe and the West. The Palace's unique ability to encode and compel changing constructions of individual and collective narratives of Polish identity provides a valuable lesson on the relationships between architecture, literature, history, and politics. Structures like the Palace carry ideological and political messages inscribed onto them by their designers and builders and serve as repositories of the changing desires and fantasies of their individual spectators or readers.     

The machine in the garden city: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a pedestrian‐scaled city of neighbourhoods supportive of an active civic life. This despite a building fabric clad exclusively in International Style garb, an architecture said to be antithetical to humane urban life. The city's success lay in the tightly controlled and binding plan provided by Patrick Geddes in 1925. Applying both a variation of the ‘super‐block’ — in a manner that actually fosters the growth of communities — as well as a platting strategy responsible for the development of a distinct building typology, Tel Aviv has managed to resist anti‐urban propositions. These characteristics, coupled with Tel Aviv's narrow streets, its interstitial spaces and its extensive planting produce a city that even proponents of traditional urbanism could applaud.     

Seismic Design

Abstract

“We took the building down with dignity.”¹ Through the act of removing an unstable but culturally significant structure in an African American community, Studio South explored architecture as process and politics. The necessary erasure of this Segregation era landmark resulted in a series of celebratory events within the community through the Studio's method of disassembly and revelation. The site of the landmark has been reactivated by the intervention of Studio South and will now continue to evolve even as it recalls the past.     

BEFORE AND AFTER THE CREATIVE CITY: THE POLITICS OF URBAN CULTURAL POLICY IN AUSTIN,TEXAS

ABSTRACT: This article examines the politics and practice of urban cultural policy in Austin, Texas. I demonstrate how aspects of the local context frame how local government and cultural sector interests strive to initiate the direction of policy. While larger trends—such as Richard Florida's creative city thesis—influence cultural policy and planning, specific contextual factors including prior economic development and growth management policy, departmental organization, the forum for interaction between municipal actors and non‐governmental coalitions, and the character of the city's cultural economy mediate such trends to produce policy outcomes. As this case shows, contemporary urban cultural policy is not simply due to the rise of the creative city discourse, but is an evolving product of past policy structures and shaped by local institutions and actors.     

Creating an Holistic Emergency Alert Management Platform

ABSTRACT

Extreme natural events require effective emergency procedures to minimize adverse effects on a region’s population and economy. Such procedures typically involve the effort of several different teams of first responders (e.g., fire fighters, public administrations, police departments, utility companies), hence coordination is fundamental to the effectiveness of the response to the emergency that must be supported with adequate infrastructures. Nonetheless, first responders often rely on manual processes, in the life cycle of extreme events, which do not change consistently with the type of shock or affected population. The aim of this paper is to present a technology transfer process to improve both the emergency alert process and the knowledge of disaster-type safety procedures through the implementation of a proposed platform. We also highlight a pilot application on a post-disaster case study—the province of L’Aquila (Abruzzi) in Italy.     

The development of a spatial resource inventory system for countryside planning purposes in the Clwydian hills of North Wales

THE IMPROVEMENT OF LONDON'S GREEN BELT — A SECOND REPORT (SC 860R) Green Belt Working Group, Standing Conference on London and South East Regional Planning

THE SCHOOL OUTDOOR RESOURCE AREA School Council Project Environment 1970–73 (Longmans 1974: Price £2.95) University of Newcastle Upon Tyne Director — R W Coleton, Deputy Director — R F Morgan

URBAN WASTELAND A report on land lying dormant in cities, towns and villages in Britain by Timothy Cantell 1977 56pp. CIVIC TRUST.