Reveiw: Back to the Future: New Histories of New York in a New Age of Inequality (Journal of Urban History, 2015) (original) (raw)
2015
In this chapter, we propose to follow over several decades the long, turbulent politics of composing an urban order in both its social and material dimensions – a political task that involves debates and confrontations to determine the city’s forms and, more fundamentally, who could live there and how. At stake is a quest for emancipation and the art of governing difference, a dialectic where the city reveals both its liberating and oppressive dimensions. Exploring this dialectic will, in particular, enable us to follow the slow and ambiguous integration of 1970s’ critical ideals into the order of the contemporary city.
Tracce Urbane. Italian Journal of Urban Studies, n. 7, "Towards a Genealogy of Critical Urban Studies", 2020
Aim of this special issue of Tracce Urbane is to stimulate an exploration of the historical, political, social, and intellectual reasons that brought to a peculiar and, in a way, ambiguous field of knowledge: that of critical urban studies. David Madden, Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Co-Director of the Cities Programme, and co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of In Defense of Housing: The politics of crisis (Verso, 2016), whose Italian edition is forthcoming (by Barbara Pizzo for Edit Press), has been invited to discuss the complex social arena in which critical urban studies stands, reflects, and acts. In the conversation that follows, Madden explores some fundamental topics related to the production of this specific academic knowledge, such as the ‘canonlessness’ that characterizes urban studies, the emphasis on intervention and radical transformation that inhabits critical urban studies, the utopian dimension of this tradition of study, the heterogenous genealogies that should be considered when approaching this discipline, the necessity of listening and considering the social sources of critique that rise in every neighbourhood or city around the globe, the future of critical urban studies and its relation with urban struggle, the way in which social movements contribute to its development, the role of academics in promoting social changes, his personal commitment in defense of housing as a space for inhabitants. In his words we can find a first answer to Saskia Sassen’s argument that «spaces of the expelled cry out for conceptual recognition» (Sassen, 2014: p. 222). According to Madden, this recognition cannot be only conceptual. It must be grounded, it must be critical, it must be radical.
Introduction: Narrating the City and Spaces of Contestation
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
While nation states have a disputed status in a globalised world, cities are often regarded as sovereign and global actors. Along with de-nationalising processes of increased privatisation, supranational governing and networks of transnational corporations, city administrations have developed new capabilities of orientation and governing in a global context (Sassen 2006). Inequality, poverty and segregation are some of the pressing issues that city administrations are grappling with – issues of local challenge with global relevance and repercussions, and vice versa. We wonder, if city administrations also address cultural issues that traditionally were of national concern, as fostering and narrating a sense of identity and belonging? If so, we think this shift needs to be further inquired, as we know that narrating and uses of history are not innocent practices. Rather, these are activities which consciously and unconsciously can push developments and futures in specific directions ...
"The Challenges of Urban Activism in the New Neoliberal Context"
2014
El objetivo de este trabajo es investigar los retos que enfrenta el activismo urbano contemporáneo en el nuevo contexto neoliberal. Este contexto típicamente occidental se caracteriza por una creciente atmósfera de consenso que es 'post-política' y 'post-crítica'. En la práctica artística, la 'política' y la 'crítica' han sido más y más olvidado por varias 'vueltas éticas'-que han sido continuamente recuperado para servir el dictado neoliberal de la omni-economización. Mecanismos de recuperación cada vez más astutos-como la incorporación de artistas y activistas en la reestructuración de operaciones de aburguesamientos-se han aprovechado de los efectos intrínsecos de despolitizar a la más reciente "vuelta ética". La definición de Jacques Rancière de lo "político" como una reconfiguración disensual del statu quo es fundamental para calibrar y conectar a tierra la dimensión política del activismo urbano. Además, su definición de 'democracia' justifica los desafíos políticos que pudiesen interrumpir a tecnocrática "buen gobierno". Para situar la más reciente "vuelta ética", movimientos y tendencias históricas dentro de las disciplinas del arte, la arquitectura y el urbanismo son investigados con respecto a sus ambiciones políticas, componente utópico y de los procesos de recuperación que se han convertido a menudo instantánea e incluso preventiva. Ciertas disposiciones fundamentales se recomiendan para el activismo urbano dentro de un enfoque pluralista. La definición de Rancière de "lo político" es la base para la articulación de activismo tanto conceptual como táctico, mientras que el 'utopismo dialéctico' de David Harvey sugiere un modelo para la integración de la utopía. La máxima de Francis Alÿs 'a veces' ilustra el potencial de la ambigüedad inherente a los enfoques artísticos. Estrategias contemporáneas de disenso, sobre-identificación, oscilación y entrelazado y espacialización pueden ser eficaces. Y, mientras que una disposición holístico transdiciplinaria es una brújula esencial, la disciplinariedad se puede emplear estratégicamente. La eficacia marginal del activismo urbano es una condición estructural y no debe distraer la atención de la amenaza mucho mayor de despolitización. Esta amenaza se ve agravada por el aumento de la sincronización de los dominios, los objetivos y los intereses de los capitalistas neoliberales, los tecnócratas, los artistas, los profesionales alternativos y los 'creativos'. Para mantener una actitud crítica y resistir a la recuperación, activistas urbanos pueden combinar las claras definiciones de Rancièreian de "lo politico" y de "la democracia" con una sofisticación tanto en la disposición como en la estrategia a través de integraciones hibridados de utopismo dialéctico, la ambigüedad, la ambivalencia, el disenso, la 'sobre-identificación', la autonomía y la espacialización disciplinaria, teniendo cuidado de centrarse tanto en lo residual como en el núcleo de la sociedad. Palabras clave: activismo urbano, despolitización, vueltas éticas, la política, la recuperación
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to
Wiley-ISTE , 2019
Alternative Takes to the City presents the mosaic of relations and socio-spatial conditions which compose the plurality of contemporary everyday space(s) in cities, offering "a view from below". It proposes a multidisciplinary and gendered approach to the (relational) spatialities and temporalities of the everyday, of new mobilities and of global and local networks which constitute urban life in contemporary cities. The book raises an empirically informed theoretical proposition which springs from the multiplicity of everyday experiences, as a laboratory for understanding recent socio-spatial, political and ideological transformations. Each chapter takes forward the theoretical argument based on one or more examples of concrete cities, in order to unveil the complexity and diversity of the urban condition in changing conjunctures, in which local practices connect and collide with global developments.