Dissertation•
Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance
01 Sep 2019-
About: The article was published on 2019-09-01 and is currently open access. It has received None citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Urban sociology & Social order.
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TL;DR: This paper used the turmoil over People's Park in Berkeley, California, as a means for exploring changing ideas about and practices in public space, arguing that as public space is increasingly privatized or otherwise brought under greater control, possibilities for democratic action are minimized.
Abstract: The nature of public space in contemporary society is changing. This paper uses the turmoil over People's Park in Berkeley, California, as a means for exploring changing ideas about and practices in public space. I argue that as public space is increasingly privatized or otherwise brought under greater control, possibilities for democratic action are minimized. To make this claim, I provide a brief outline of the roots of the August 1991 riots at People's Park. I then examine the role that public space plays in modern democracies, and how ideas about public space have developed dialectically with definitions of who counts as “the public.” In American democracy, “the public” is constituted by private individuals. In this paper, I suggest that the presence of homeless people in public spaces raises important contradictions at the heart of this definition of “the public.” Many commentators suggest that these contradictions have led to “the end of public space” in contemporary cities, or at the very ...
1,018 citations
976 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the author argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification.
Abstract: This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematic...
959 citations
TL;DR: The authors discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years, focusing on subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, conditions that sustain heterarchies and valuation and evaluative practices.
Abstract: This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.
930 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Crampton argues that the political parallel between mapping and sexual practices is tenuous at best, or may not even exist, and argues that those with power and privilege may well indulge themselves to meet their own idiosyncratic psychological needs for the sake of pleasures.
Abstract: His ethical framework needs more fine-tuning for at least two reasons. First, this ethical framework seems to be disconnected from the issues discussed in the book. Instead of showing how the ethical framework can guide us to better cope with issues such as authenticity, privacy, surveillance, and digital divide, the author indulges in a rather abstract philosophical discussion for its own sake in the final chapter. And second, although the pleasure of mapping cannot be denied, it is a stretch to elevate ‘‘pleasure’’ to be a guiding ethical principle directing our mapping practices in the real world. In weaving his argument about the pleasure principle applied to mapping, Crampton draws heavily on McWhorter’s (1999) work on societal pressure for sexual normalization. The political parallel between mapping versus sexual practices is tenuous at best, or may not even exist. If our future mapping effort is indeed guided by the pleasure principle, those with power and privilege may well indulge themselves to meet their own idiosyncratic psychological needs for the sake of pleasures, which will result in the perpetuation of inequity and divide what the framework aims to eradicate. Therefore, the proposed ethical framework has perhaps created a new set of problematics (if I can borrow from the Foucauldian vocabulary). However, we are reminded by Crampton that ‘‘as long as cyberspace is a problem, we will always have something to do’’ (p. 15), which is indeed a comforting thought for all of us in academia.
926 citations