Ursula Lang - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Ursula Lang

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2006

This study of middle-class American families draws on ethnography and urban economic history, foc... more This study of middle-class American families draws on ethnography and urban economic history, focusing on patterns of leisure time and household consumption and clutter. We trace how residential life evolved historically from cramped urban quarters into contemporary middle-class residences and examine how busy working families use house spaces. Our ethnographic sample consists of 24 Los Angeles families in which both parents work full time, have young children, and own their homes. Formal datasets include systematically timed family uses of home spaces, a large digital archive of photographs, and family-narrated video home tours. This analysis highlights a salient home-storage crisis, a marked shift in the uses of yards and garages, and the dissolution of outdoor leisure for busy working parents. Keywords Clutter AE Dual-earner families AE Home spaces AE Leisure time AE Suburban history The UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program on the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families. Anthony Graesch assisted with the tables. Additional information about CELF can be found at www.celf.ucla.edu.

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the c... more Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the commons. This interest corresponds to a growing quest for alternatives to capitalism in view of ongoing socio- ecological crises. As neoliberal capitalism intensifies enclosure of the commons, local actions to reclaim old commons and invent new ones to counter these processes are also on the rise. However, there are diverse conceptions of the commons, and pitfalls in their reproduction and in mobilizing this vocabulary in the dominant neoliberal individualistic culture. Our understanding remains limited about how spaces for commons and commoning practices can be expanded, as well as about specific practices, relations and imaginaries that support commons and subjectivities of being-in-common. This Special Issue on the “Commons, Commoning and Co-becomings” seeks to deepen our understanding of ‘actually-existing’ and ‘more-than- human’ commons in the world, and how ways of relating to them ...

Case Studies in the Environment

For the most part, research and policymaking on urban gardening have focused on community gardens... more For the most part, research and policymaking on urban gardening have focused on community gardens, whether in parks, vacant lots, or other public land. This emphasis, while important for many Midwestern cities, can obscure the significance of privately owned land such as front yard and back yard and their crucial connections with gardening on public land. In this case study, we examine how policies and practices related to gardening and the management of green space in two Midwestern cities exceed narrow visions of urban agriculture. The article explores the cultivation of vacant lot gardens and private yards as two modes of property in similar Midwestern contexts and argues that the management of green space is about more than urban agriculture. Instead, we show how urban gardening occurs across public/private property distinctions and involves a broader set of actors than those typically included in sustainability policies. Gardening also provides a key set of connections through ...

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the c... more Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the commons. This interest corresponds to a growing quest for alternatives to capitalism in view of ongoing socio-ecological crises. As neoliberal capitalism intensifies enclosure of the commons, local actions to reclaim old commons and invent new ones to counter these processes are also on the rise. However, there are diverse conceptions of the commons, and pitfalls in their reproduction and in mobilizing this vocabulary in the dominant neoliberal individualistic culture. Our understanding remains limited about how spaces for commons and commoning practices can be expanded, as well as about specific practices, relations and imaginaries that support commons and subjectivities of being-in-common. This Special Issue on the "Commons, Commoning and Cobecomings" seeks to deepen our understanding of 'actually-existing' and 'more-thanhuman' commons in the world, and how ways of relating to them open up possibilities of responding to current socioenvironmental challenges and generating beyond-capitalist ways of life. Exploring commoning experiences in diverse settings, the papers assembled in this Special Issue illustrate the role that commons and commoning practices play in reconfiguring human-nature relations. Thinking with these papers,

This paper provides a critical assessment of geographic research on yards and private gardens, wi... more This paper provides a critical assessment of geographic research on yards and private gardens, with a focus on how geographers study people's engagements with more than human organisms and surroundings. Geographies have come alive as assemblages of lively materials, distributed agencies, and animated political and material flows. At the

I help Sandra add fresh mulch to her boulevard garden. Earlier in the visit, she told me about he... more I help Sandra add fresh mulch to her boulevard garden. Earlier in the visit, she told me about her relationship to her yard in striking terms, about the ways she interacts through her body with the plants that live there. Sandra has an intensively cultivated yard from front to back-full of plants, seating areas, and art objects. She told me: This is where I live.. .. I wake up in the morning thinking to myself, "Ooh! I'm off work today-I can come out and touch my yard." Everybody doesn't feel that way. Others look at it as a chore.. .. What people don't realize is that they think they can put in a plant and that's it. It still has to be touched. It's just like a child, they want to feel like they're loved, and they want food and nourishment. I think that you have to really want to do it, the passion has to be within you, to put your hand in the soil. And I love touching the dirt. I like the feel of it. I just can't stand it when I have gloves on. I like the soil. The thing about gardens to me is that they're living, and so you want to touch them. Sandra, more than most, articulates her relationship to her yard in terms of an embodied responsiveness between person and plant, including the importance of touch and care over time. {SEE IMAGE AT END} {~?~TN: Figure 9.1} Sandra mulches her front boulevard garden in North Minneapolis, summer 2012. Photograph by the author. In urban and suburban residential areas, yards are among the sites people can most directly design, shape, and make their own. This essay, based on ethnographic fieldwork with residents in their yards, examines two ways these mundane, familiar spaces may be important lenses into worlds of everyday life: lived experiences of cultivation and inhabitation at the scale of the human body in practice, and the importance of yards in the broader social context of neighborhood life. As people live with yards (often over long periods), these spaces become enmeshed in daily life. They are sites for a variety of cultivation practices, from the basic maintenance of lawns and existing landscape features to the development of elaborate worlds comprising human and nonhuman elements. As such, they are bound up with-but never

Though appearing to reside comfortably within the language of the majority, buildings may provide... more Though appearing to reside comfortably within the language of the majority, buildings may provide a medium within which a minor architecture might be situated. The subtle aesthetic within these spaces will likely evade even the trained eye of an architectural photographer, though a canny journalist may be able to track the intricate relations of its existence, which are wrapped up in time. A minor architecture is political because it is mobilized from below, from substrata that may not even register in the sanctioned operations of the profession.-Jill Stoner (2012, 2-4) Yards are one kind of connective tissue. Negotiating differences happens in the space between an interior and an exterior, a house and property lines, a house and street, a house and another house, a house and a back alley.

Urban Geography, 2014

Recent scholarship has begun to reimagine the commons beyond its traditional meaning as a collect... more Recent scholarship has begun to reimagine the commons beyond its traditional meaning as a collectively owned and managed natural resource. Building on research that considers commons through the practices which produce and maintain them—commoning—this article analyzes how privately owned front and backyards participate in urban commons. Through ethnographic research in three neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the article shows how these commons are made in two key registers: through yards as shared territories and through everyday practices of sharing plants across individual yards. The article’s central claim is that yards and the everyday practices which take place in and through them constitute one nodal point in the making of urban commons. In so doing, logics of private property come to be interwoven with logics of commoning. By finding a diverse range of common lives of yards, this article adds to emerging conversations about the nature of urban commons.

Urban Geography, May 2014

In the past 20 years, municipal governments across the United States have increasingly tried to i... more In the past 20 years, municipal governments across the United States have increasingly tried to incorporate environmental efforts into city business and policies. Urban sustainability has become the key concept around which such activities are organized. Official sustainability plans are most often implemented through indicators and metrics. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, urban gardening, in a variety of forms, has been the focus of ongoing citizen- and NGO-led environmental efforts, as well as municipal measures of sustainability. Here, debates around the recent adoption of a city urban agriculture policy, as well as a program to encourage the installation of raingardens in neighborhoods across the city, reveal some of the rich variations in gardening practices and spaces. These far exceed the relatively narrow official focus on sustainability indicators. Better understanding how urban sustainability initiatives might work with, but also move beyond, indicators may provide directions toward wider visions of sustainable urban life.

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2007

Book Reviews by Ursula Lang

Antipode, Jul 2013

It may be surprising to most readers that one of the most ubiquitous features of residential land... more It may be surprising to most readers that one of the most ubiquitous features of residential landscapes all across the United States has received so little scholarly attention as to be almost invisible - the ordinary postwar house. Dianne Harris' new book ably challenges this entrenched invisibility on at least two significant fronts: first, the fundamental lack of focus on articulations between race and architecture, especially in the historical accounts of mid-century suburban landscapes; second, the often missing analysis of built environments on the part of historians and others interested in the formation of population racial thinking - even in the places such as newly developing mid-century suburbs, where nonwhite exclusion was most pervasive. [... continues...]

Journal articles by Ursula Lang

Case Studies in the Environment, 2019

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2006

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Case Studies in the Environment

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the c... more Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the commons. This interest corresponds to a growing quest for alternatives to capitalism in view of ongoing socio-ecological crises. As neoliberal capitalism intensifies enclosure of the commons, local actions to reclaim old commons and invent new ones to counter these processes are also on the rise. However, there are diverse conceptions of the commons, and pitfalls in their reproduction and in mobilizing this vocabulary in the dominant neoliberal individualistic culture. Our understanding remains limited about how spaces for commons and commoning practices can be expanded, as well as about specific practices, relations and imaginaries that support commons and subjectivities of being-in-common. This Special Issue on the "Commons, Commoning and Cobecomings" seeks to deepen our understanding of 'actually-existing' and 'more-thanhuman' commons in the world, and how ways of relating to them open up possibilities of responding to current socioenvironmental challenges and generating beyond-capitalist ways of life. Exploring commoning experiences in diverse settings, the papers assembled in this Special Issue illustrate the role that commons and commoning practices play in reconfiguring human-nature relations. Thinking with these papers,

Urban Geography, 2014

Urban Geography, May 2014

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2007

Antipode, Jul 2013

Case Studies in the Environment, 2019