Showing papers in "Public Culture in 2013"

Theses on Urbanization

Abstract: In the early 1970s, a young Marxist sociologist named Manuel Castells, then living in exile in Paris, began his soontobe-classic intervention, The Urban Question, by declaring his “astonishment” that debates on “urban problems” were becoming “an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media and, consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population” (1977 [1972]: 1). For Castells, this astonishment was born of his orthodox Marxist assumption that the concern with urban questions was ideological. The real motor of social change, he believed, lay elsewhere, in workingclass action and antiimperialist mobilization. On this basis, Castells proceeded to deconstruct what he viewed as the prevalent “urban ideology” under postwar managerial capitalism: his theory took seriously the social construction of the urban phenomenon in academic and political discourse, but ultimately derived such representations from purportedly more foundational processes associated with capitalism and the state’s role in the reproduction of labor power. Four decades after Castells’s classic intervention, it is easy to confront early twentyfirstcentury discourse on urban questions with a similar sense of astonishment — not because it masks the operations of capitalism but because it has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere. Today advanced interdisciplinary education in urban social science, planning, and design

Test-Bed Urbanism

Abstract: This essay interrogates the new forms of experimentation with urban territory emerging as a result of ubiquitous computing infrastructures. We label these protocols “test-bed urbanism.” Smart, sentient, stupid, and speculative all at once, these new methods for spatial development are changing the form, function, economy, and administration of urban life.

Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge

Abstract: Metabolism is a term and concept established in the nineteenth century with the coming together of chemistry and animal physiology (Kamminga 1995; Bing 1971). It was, suitably enough, a metabolism for an industrial era, focused on the conversion of matter from the raw materials of nature to the products of man. Metabolism was understood as a factory, as the activity of “thousands of minute workshops,” or “a singular inward laboratory” filled with reactionfacilitating chemistry apparatus (Voit quoted in Nichols and Reeds 1991: 1889; Huxley 1869: 137). The sciences of the interconversions of matter — Stoffwechsel — were supplemented slightly later with detailed studies of bodily conversions of food to energy — Kraftwechsel — and the resulting image of “the human motor” has been well described (Rabinbach 1992). Max Rubner, a German physiologist in whose efforts lie the origins of our contemporary logics of the calorie — he was the first to make tables of the energy contents of foods with the direct intent of rationalizing nutrition — was deeply concerned with food as the source of bodily work (Gratzer 2005). Wilbur Olin Atwater, an American scientist trained in Germany, brought home both the techniques and the politics of Rubner’s Arbeitsphysiologie (physiology of work). Funded by industrialists interested in quelling labor unrest, nutrition science and the politics of the living wage in early twentiethcentury America were deeply linked in Atwater’s own tables of how much energy could be purchased for the same money in wheat versus cabbage (Aronson 1982; Mudry 2009).

The Ruralization of the World

Abstract: We live, we are told, in a world that is urbanizing and that is urbanizing at a rapid pace. But the diagnosis of urbalization has lost all meaning. To fully make sense of current sociospatial transformations, we need to also analyze them from the perspective of that which is supposedly acted upon or being transformed. A focus on ruralization brings into view not only urban agriculture and urban wildlife but also boring towns and farmers in suburbs. This approach allows us to study new developments that only become visible once we abandon the narrow focus on urbanization, such as the emergence of new forms of improvisation in the face of failing infrastructures.

No Contest: Participatory Technologies and the Transformation of Urban Authority

Abstract: This essay describes the transformation of civic participation from a tool of democratization into a tool for elite authority. Looking at various participatory projects in community-based organizations in a city in America’s Rust Belt, the essay demonstrates how the very architecture of civil society is being manipulated to marginalize dissent. This raises the question of whether the design of institutions has outpaced our critiques of them.

Does the City Have Speech

Abstract: Arguing, as I do in this essay, that cities have speech, albeit of a very different sort from that of citizens and corporations, is in many ways a question transversal to both the law and urbanism. It is not present in either one of these bodies of scholarship; this is particularly so since I do not confine the notion of speech to that of urban government, nor do I construct the content of the city's speech in the terms provided by the law. Thus the inquiry requires expanding the analytic terrain for examining the concept of each, speech and the city.

Tertiary Time: The Precariat’s Dilemma

Abstract: Progressive politics has always been about the struggle to reduce social inequities and inequalities. What takes priority depends on the type of society we live in. Today people in rich countries live in societies that are tertiary, not industrial, in that what they do is largely covered by “services.” In a tertiary society, one iniquitous form of inequality is control of time. Time is a key asset. But we do not have a conceptualization of tertiary time. We must rectify that so as to develop a progressive politics of time.

Poiesis Means Making

Abstract: Poiesis means making. It means making our world, but it also means making ourselves. The idea that the world is created by people in history, both consciously and through cumulative unintended effects, represents the bulwark of the modern secular social sciences. From this foundation, scholars have argued that fundamental features of our world that we often take to be natural, from race and gender to politics and the economy, are actually products of human making. This is the basis for the twined concepts of social construction and human agency. Rarely, however, do we focus on construction not as a metaphor but as a concrete human activity. While the terms social construction and human agency both point toward the study of creative activity, they tend to operate at a level of abstraction that seldom contains analysis of how things are actually created, including the conditions of creation as well as the products that come out of it. This special issue of Public Culture is based on a collective research project, the Poiesis Fellowship, which aims to shed light on human creativity.1 In the pages that follow, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars — from a physicist based in Munich to a journalist based in Bombay to a filmmaker based in New York — examine creativity not just as an idea but as a concrete practice, as something we do, and as something we do not simply in special circumstances but in our everyday lives. Our focus is on the city, as both a context for creative action and a product of that creative action. Our decision to focus on cities is a strategic one. As the centers of contemporary economic power and influence, cities are now home to more than half of humanity. They are sites of global connections and interactions across basic

Designing Urban Democracy: Mapping Scales of Urban Identity

Abstract: Much of the discourse on the future of cities is trapped in a professional paradigm that focuses on the role of urban planners and policy makers, while everyday urban realities are being shaped by a very different set of informal processes and actors that are largely immune to planning and policy making. Based on the observation and analysis of projects, developments, and initiatives at a metropolitan level and “on the ground” in over twenty cities, this essay argues that the potential for social integration and democratic engagement of socially excluded urban residents is often realized through small-scale “acupuncture” projects, which succeed in bringing people and communities together in ways that formal planning processes have failed to do. What is happening on the ground can be described as a process of urban integration that both questions our role as urban designers and planners in terms of what we design and for whom and shifts the focus of analysis away from the rather blunt instruments of “top-down versus bottom-up” planning toward a more nuanced understanding of processes of urban “accretion and rupture.”

The Field of Struggle, the Office, and the Flat: Protest and Aspiration in a Mumbai Slum

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between the changing organization of urban space and the evolving political culture of a Mumbai slum. Recent work emphasizes that the contemporary city is highly fragmented and poor people are incapable of realizing a fully civil society. The essay uses the case of struggles over the redevelopment of Golibar to critically interrogate these arguments. The essay finds that the city’s poor are the social location that continues to sustain the aspiration for an inclusive urbanism and a more civil society.

Putting America in Its Place

Abstract: It is now a commonplace that the media are global, or that they create, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, a global village, and that such globality comes to us as a mediated phenomenon. If we needed any reminding of this fact, recent uprisings from Tahrir Square to Occupy, as well as many smaller movements against corruption and for citizens’ rights, have provided it. In what lies this globality of media, and are we celebrating its worldliness too easily? Rather than assume that media technology is inherently global in its form, we should ask how it came to be regarded as such. I argue that the historical origins of the media are specifically North American. While their physical reach may be global, our understanding of the media’s relation to globalization will retain the influence of its provincial origin unless we bring it into view as a problem (see Chakrabarty 2000). Criticisms of United States – centric theories are familiar from debates on modernization theory. We will recall that the word modernization synthesized liberal postwar American values to present an abstract idea of what many intellectuals wished the United States would become. It also prescribed an agenda for new states in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “By defining a singular path of progressive change,” a historian recently observed, “the concept of modernization simplified the worldhistorical problems of decolonization and industrialization, helping to guide American economic aid and military intervention in postcolonial regions” (Gilman 2003: 3). Modernization expressed anxiety about the United State’s place in the Cold War era as well as confidence that with economic growth

How Much Is Enough

Abstract: During the great heat waves of 1995 in Chicago and 2003 in Paris, many people, especially but not only elderly people living alone, died, and the news media in both cities were filled with discussions of what had happened, how and why it had happened, and especially whose fault it all was. The question was raised repeatedly, and continues to be raised: could more have been done to prevent these deaths, by taking greater pains, by being better prepared, by having systems in place to monitor the conditions of life for older people living alone? Most simply and practically, couldn't air conditioning units have been distributed to those who needed them? In Sweden, as French television viewers learned, social workers visit elderly people living alone several times each day, checking on their well-being. Each social worker has something like four people to care for in this way. Why hadn't city governments in Chicago and Paris undertaken such simple protective measures?

Data and Control — a Digital Manifesto

Abstract: This is a plea for democratic supervision and regulation of the large data sets that are currently being collected all over the digital world—a plea driven not by fears for the privacy of the individual but by worries that a privileged knowledge of the mechanics governing the social world could allow for a one-sided and largely unrecognized control of the masses. In the nineteenth century, in an age of unprecedented and seemingly limitless technological and scientific progress, scientists had a dream—a vision of a social science as systematic and powerful as the most developed of the natural sciences, a science of man modeled after physics. Like celestial mechanics, such a social science could be reduced to a few principles from which, under sufficient knowledge of the boundary conditions, everything else becomes derivable. It would allow for the prediction of the future course of the major actors in society just as celestial mechanics allows for the determination of the trajectory of Venus or Mars, The dream was never realized. With obvious frustration, methodologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, great and penetrating minds like the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, blamed this failure on the complexity of the social world and the fact that social phenomena do not fit neatly into a laboratory and are thus exempt from systematic experimentation. The social scientist cannot just exchange a democracy for a dictatorship, run history again, and record the effects of the change. Observing the fate of man in society rarely leads to causal knowledge allowing for