April 16, 2014 - 2:25pm
[photo by Garry Winogrand]
I'm going to break up this reading response into two parts: a reaction to some direct statements Becker makes, and a parallel with the discussion from this week's theory II class.
I took a photojournalism class in undergrad, in which we learned a bit about technique and a lot about the history and certain standout figures in the field. A lot...
April 9, 2014 - 3:23pm
In “(Re)Presenting the Street,” Rubin challenges conventional notions of city planning that mistakenly perceive the city as singular object that can be ‘fixed’ as such. He proposes an alternative way of examining the “street as a diverse social space” which exists in a “jarring, fragmented succession of images and encounters that characterize the lived experience of the modern city” through...
April 2, 2014 - 2:37pm
Guy Debord’s writings bring up psychological perceptions of the environment and manifests his ideas through his development of the derive. The derive itself is a paradox, combining subjective and objective methods of observation and interpretation. It emphasizes entrances and exits, something I find surprisingly astute since those are the things we look for most often in an urban setting....
March 26, 2014 - 3:41pm
Emily Bell
The Crimes of the Flaneur, Tom McDonough
McDonough opens up for us a duality with which we all may be mutely aware in our own interactions in the city coming upon strangers in the street. The flaneur has assumed changing roles in the city according to normative models in the city. In particular, McDonough will identify the flaneur as both detective and as criminal...
March 26, 2014 - 3:15pm
“Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern literature.” (Benjamin, 42)
“Poe's famous tale 'The Man of the Crowd' is something like the X-ray picture of a detective story. In it, the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who arranges his walk through London in such a way that he...
March 26, 2014 - 12:52pm
In The Legibility of the Everyday City, Amin and Thrift present the dilemma of how one can theorize about cities without losing the unique variations, vitality, and urban practices that make a city what it is and how it is experienced. How does one further the study of cities without making a method too systematic to the point of losing the true values or traits of a city?
In discussing...
February 26, 2014 - 2:07pm
Sikivu Hutchinson reveals, through Los Angeles’s history of urban transportation, the racial and gender inequalities of the American urban and suburban society in the last century, which persist to this day. The public transportation system is a lifeline for carless workers, an idea which drivers do not realize or sympathize with.
“[E]astside communities of color languished from a lack...
February 26, 2014 - 12:52pm
In the text “The Right to the City,” Don Mitchell uses “People’s Park” in Berkeley as a case study to explain the role of public space and the variables that influence the discourse. As he explains the history of struggle over People’s Park, among the University of California, City and Government officials, activists, students and residents (and the homeless), Mitchell illustrates the stance...
February 26, 2014 - 10:50am
In “The ‘Creative Class’ and the Gentrifying City”, Ocean Howell argues that “bohemian” or “countercultural” lifestyles are becoming institutionalized as instruments of urban development. Using skateboarders in Love Park as an example, he chronicles their turbulent relationship with the city of Philadelphia.
Howell first makes an important distinction between urban renewal or “...
February 26, 2014 - 1:22am
The readings this week offer an intensive look at the role of public space within the city and the rights of the public (especially the lower echelons of society) to occupy that space.
In The “Creative Class” and the Gentrifying City, Ocean Howell from the University of California, Berkley, argues that “the Love Park debates illustrate the extent to which “bohemian” or “countercultural...
February 19, 2014 - 3:02pm
Georg Simmel begins his essay by addressing the city's immediate effect on the "individual" -- that is to say, because we are constantly exposed to a flip book of external and internal stimuli, we knowingly, and eventually subconsciously, make decisions based on logic unhindered by emotion. These unrelenting contacts soon become regular, undifferentiated, a blur. Because we are...
February 19, 2014 - 9:51am
In "Experience of Living in Cities", Stanley Milgram asks some important questions regarding the methods of studying cities. Aside from numbers, density, and demographic facts, he stresses the importance of psychological facts which are obtained in numerous ways. Milgram seems to be very conscious about the benefits and faults of all the research methods he describes. He studies the...
February 5, 2014 - 12:04pm
In "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment", Robert Ezra Park challenges the reader to understand the city beyond it's apparent physical morphology and to focus upon its human social behaviors. Park, writing in 1915, is credited with coining the term, "human ecology", to describe how human activity in the city as similar...
February 4, 2014 - 9:29pm
The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community
R.D. McKenzie (1924)
R.D. McKenzie's "The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community" suggests that the spatial and temporal distribution of human society can be understood by analyzing it like scientists analyze plant and animal ecology - that is to say systematically and scientifically....
February 4, 2014 - 1:34pm
Urban growth is a form of metabolism.
There exists a life cycle, that begins from a center then concentrically expands like ripples, sometime coalescing into each other. The process does not terminate, but rather continues to create new ripples of expansion within the boundaries of the already established.
Transportation infrastructures set the limit of growth, and then the...
January 29, 2014 - 2:39pm
The article by Holdsworth provides a critical view on the lack of comprehensiveness in landscape research today. To emphasize the unseen issues such as gender, race, class and other topics of influence that mold the landscape is, in some ways, a crucial part of landscape studies and researches that has been absent.
Holdsworth understands the delicate system of the human geography and...
January 29, 2014 - 4:58am
I have a few (perhaps disjointed) thoughts on this reading:
First, at the very beginning of the chapter, there's some discussion about the visual illiteracy of Americans - "like fish that can't see water" - because we cannot consciously notice our everyday environments. While I would argue this illiteracy and cultural ignorance still prevails, I'd also like to...
January 28, 2014 - 11:01pm
Gabrielle Brainard 's historical account of the Court Street row houses touches upon many of the economic and social issues surrounding urban growth, decline and redevelopment. It was the industrial boom in the 1800's that spurred the development of the Wooster square area and it was industrial decline starting in the 1920's that spelled its decay. Throughout all of this, the...
