Samuel Zipp | Brown University (original) (raw)
Books by Samuel Zipp
Papers by Samuel Zipp
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
New Yorker and Harper's, and in his series of children's books, with observation, humor, and path... more New Yorker and Harper's, and in his series of children's books, with observation, humor, and pathos-the dailyness of people and places, language, nature, city life, and the meadows and avenues of the self. He professed to be by turns overawed and impatient with those he called, writing about a group of well-known liberal writers, "intellectual idealists," and with their propensity to "live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does." 1 He was a humorist and a practitioner of light verse, but finally White was a skeptic; he tended to steer shy of faith or political commitment and head for a more encompassing and aggregate morality grounded in basic notions of freedom and individualism. And yet here he was in the 1950s, waxing poetic about the United Nations and its headquarters building-of all things-which he playfully called "the little green shebang on the East River": Even the building itself leaks; it has weep-holes in the spandrels, and is open to the rains and the winds of the world. Confronted with its unsuccess, confronted with its frauds and its trickeries and its interminable debates, we yet stand inside the place and feel the winds of the world weeping into our own body, feel the force underlying the United Nations, the force that is beyond question and beyond compare and not beyond the understanding of children. It will be their task (as it is ours) to plug the weepholes in the spandrels. 2
Culture^2
These new aesthetic forms … emerge during the 1990s to register a shift in how the older state-li... more These new aesthetic forms … emerge during the 1990s to register a shift in how the older state-liberal-capitalist fantasies shape adjustments to the structural pressures of crisis and loss that are wearing out the power of the good life's traditional fantasy bribe without wearing out the need for a good life." (7) 1 They shimmer there on the page or the screen, the promise of life remade, the city reconciled with its natural underpinnings, brought to its fullest civic and predictably diverse fulfillment. It's a kind of fever dream for our times-the developer's utopia as mirage of public life. I'm often seduced by these images anyway-longing overcoming better judgment-and sometimes by the places themselves, even when they take shape in a form that is always somehow just a tad less shimmery and just-so than they appeared in prospect. They are relentlessly pleasant, even as one cannot help but feel they are something of a swindle-"the good life's traditional fantasy bribe," Lauren Berlant might call them.
Aesthetics of Gentrification
Journal of Urban History, May 1, 2013
Recent scholarly interest in urban renewal has established its place in the social and political ... more Recent scholarly interest in urban renewal has established its place in the social and political history of the postwar United States. The contributors to this special section argue that equal attention is now needed to the intellectual debates that marked urban renewal’s conception, implementation, and undoing. Investigating renewal’s conflicted origins and untidy demise through the history of ideas can restore some of the historical specificity and contingency to understandings of a policy that has long been portrayed as simply a foreordained failure.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
This essay argues that the writer E. B. White, best known for his literary essays and children’s ... more This essay argues that the writer E. B. White, best known for his literary essays and children’s books, also had a significant but neglected career as a political writer. It considers his writings, during and just after World War II, on the subject of world government, and argues that he made the case for world federation by way of a novel model of cosmopolitanism that results from love of place and country rather than from dispensing with them. It considers the reception of his 1946 book The Wild Flag and the productive tension between White’s skepticism about political advocacy and his attempt to imagine a public for world government as constituted through his vision of cosmopolitanism.
Author(s): Zipp, Samuel | Abstract: Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular... more Author(s): Zipp, Samuel | Abstract: Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related i...
This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her ... more This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs’ contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs’ “reticence” on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs’ signature ideas – the “sidewalk ballet,” organized complexity, the “self-destruction of diversity,” and others – appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.
Aesthetics of Gentrification
This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her ... more This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs' contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs' "reticence" on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs' signature ideas-the "sidewalk ballet," organized complexity, the "selfdestruction of diversity," and others-appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.
Journal of Urban History, 2014
Modern American History
This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especiall... more This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller, One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered a universal view of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial power contested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial power obscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour from One World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.
The Proceedings of Spaces of History Histories of Space Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment, Sep 15, 2010
Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relati... more Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related in a process of flux and struggle across time and space.
Journal of Urban History, 2013
American Literary History, 2014
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
New Yorker and Harper's, and in his series of children's books, with observation, humor, and path... more New Yorker and Harper's, and in his series of children's books, with observation, humor, and pathos-the dailyness of people and places, language, nature, city life, and the meadows and avenues of the self. He professed to be by turns overawed and impatient with those he called, writing about a group of well-known liberal writers, "intellectual idealists," and with their propensity to "live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does." 1 He was a humorist and a practitioner of light verse, but finally White was a skeptic; he tended to steer shy of faith or political commitment and head for a more encompassing and aggregate morality grounded in basic notions of freedom and individualism. And yet here he was in the 1950s, waxing poetic about the United Nations and its headquarters building-of all things-which he playfully called "the little green shebang on the East River": Even the building itself leaks; it has weep-holes in the spandrels, and is open to the rains and the winds of the world. Confronted with its unsuccess, confronted with its frauds and its trickeries and its interminable debates, we yet stand inside the place and feel the winds of the world weeping into our own body, feel the force underlying the United Nations, the force that is beyond question and beyond compare and not beyond the understanding of children. It will be their task (as it is ours) to plug the weepholes in the spandrels. 2
Culture^2
These new aesthetic forms … emerge during the 1990s to register a shift in how the older state-li... more These new aesthetic forms … emerge during the 1990s to register a shift in how the older state-liberal-capitalist fantasies shape adjustments to the structural pressures of crisis and loss that are wearing out the power of the good life's traditional fantasy bribe without wearing out the need for a good life." (7) 1 They shimmer there on the page or the screen, the promise of life remade, the city reconciled with its natural underpinnings, brought to its fullest civic and predictably diverse fulfillment. It's a kind of fever dream for our times-the developer's utopia as mirage of public life. I'm often seduced by these images anyway-longing overcoming better judgment-and sometimes by the places themselves, even when they take shape in a form that is always somehow just a tad less shimmery and just-so than they appeared in prospect. They are relentlessly pleasant, even as one cannot help but feel they are something of a swindle-"the good life's traditional fantasy bribe," Lauren Berlant might call them.
Aesthetics of Gentrification
Journal of Urban History, May 1, 2013
Recent scholarly interest in urban renewal has established its place in the social and political ... more Recent scholarly interest in urban renewal has established its place in the social and political history of the postwar United States. The contributors to this special section argue that equal attention is now needed to the intellectual debates that marked urban renewal’s conception, implementation, and undoing. Investigating renewal’s conflicted origins and untidy demise through the history of ideas can restore some of the historical specificity and contingency to understandings of a policy that has long been portrayed as simply a foreordained failure.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
This essay argues that the writer E. B. White, best known for his literary essays and children’s ... more This essay argues that the writer E. B. White, best known for his literary essays and children’s books, also had a significant but neglected career as a political writer. It considers his writings, during and just after World War II, on the subject of world government, and argues that he made the case for world federation by way of a novel model of cosmopolitanism that results from love of place and country rather than from dispensing with them. It considers the reception of his 1946 book The Wild Flag and the productive tension between White’s skepticism about political advocacy and his attempt to imagine a public for world government as constituted through his vision of cosmopolitanism.
Author(s): Zipp, Samuel | Abstract: Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular... more Author(s): Zipp, Samuel | Abstract: Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related i...
This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her ... more This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs’ contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs’ “reticence” on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs’ signature ideas – the “sidewalk ballet,” organized complexity, the “self-destruction of diversity,” and others – appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.
Aesthetics of Gentrification
This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her ... more This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs' contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs' "reticence" on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs' signature ideas-the "sidewalk ballet," organized complexity, the "selfdestruction of diversity," and others-appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.
Journal of Urban History, 2014
Modern American History
This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especiall... more This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller, One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered a universal view of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial power contested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial power obscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour from One World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.
The Proceedings of Spaces of History Histories of Space Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment, Sep 15, 2010
Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relati... more Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related in a process of flux and struggle across time and space.
Journal of Urban History, 2013
American Literary History, 2014
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012
Reviews in American History, 2008
Reviews in American History, 2008