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Full-Text Articles in Architecture
Conveniently Located Disaster: Socio‐Spatial Inequality In Hurricane Sandy And Its Implications For The Urban Sociology Of Climate Change, Gordon Douglas, Liz Koslov, Eric Klinenberg
Conveniently Located Disaster: Socio‐Spatial Inequality In Hurricane Sandy And Its Implications For The Urban Sociology Of Climate Change, Gordon Douglas, Liz Koslov, Eric Klinenberg
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
Hurricane Sandy was a major event with major implications for how sociologists think about the relationship between climate change and crisis in urban areas. The storm’s impact on New York provides a valuable case for considering how to study the impacts of climate change on large, densely settled cities with vulnerable hard infrastructure and highly complex social conditions that produce differentiated experiences across many different communities. This working paper considers data at several levels of analysis with the aim of assessing neighborhood inequalities in the impacts of such extreme weather. Drawn from the authors’ ongoing research project on unequal vulnerability …
Review Of Cities By Design, By Fran Tonkiss, Gordon Douglas
Review Of Cities By Design, By Fran Tonkiss, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
A review of Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. By Fran Tonkiss. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2014. Pp. vi+204. $24.95.
The Self-Conscious Gentrifier: The Paradox Of Authenticity And Impact Among "First-Wave Neo-Bohemians" In 2 Changing Neighborhoods, Naomi Bartz, Gordon Douglas
The Self-Conscious Gentrifier: The Paradox Of Authenticity And Impact Among "First-Wave Neo-Bohemians" In 2 Changing Neighborhoods, Naomi Bartz, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
Gentrification has been a major factor reshaping North American cities for at least four decades, as well as a vital concern of sociological research. In recent years, there appears to be an increasing awareness of the process among contemporary gentrifiers themselves. This self-conscoiusness is significant on two levels: (1) it is unanticipated by or at least unaccounted for in much of the canonical literature on gentrification, having only recently gained acknowledgement (most notably work by Brown-Saracino that explores aspects of a particular type of self-aware gentrifiier); (2) it is complicating the way many gentrifiers or would-be gentrifiers frame and actively …
Do-It‐Yourself Urban Design: Making Local Improvements Through Unauthorized Alterations Of Urban Space, Gordon Douglas
Do-It‐Yourself Urban Design: Making Local Improvements Through Unauthorized Alterations Of Urban Space, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
This study examines “spatial interventions”: street art, guerrilla gardening, public space invasions, and other unauthorized practices of place-based, site-specific art or activism that challenge the normative uses or meanings of particular urban spaces. In recent years, a growing number of individuals have taken up these forms of site-specific direct action. Some argue that they represent new strategies of political expression, even “resistance”; others, that it is little more than vandalism or pointless juvenile acting out. Yet my research suggests that many of these actions are rather connected by something more subtle, a simple willingness to reimagine the built environment on …
'The Edge Of The Island': Neighborhood Identity And Evolving Community In 'Liminal Places', Gordon Douglas
'The Edge Of The Island': Neighborhood Identity And Evolving Community In 'Liminal Places', Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
This paper examines the contemporary processes at work in urban areas without clear spatial identities that are simultaneously facing the challenges of cultural change and gentrification. I do so through the close analysis of one such ‘liminal place’ on Chicago’s West Side. I use the phrase ‘a community on the edge of the island’ to describe the area, inspired by an interview subject who referred to the tenuous search for a sort of ideal bohemian hipness as the need to stay as “close to the edge of the island” as possible without actually leaving it. Making use of ethnographic and …
Cultural Sincerity In Urban Development, Gordon Douglas
Cultural Sincerity In Urban Development, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
This paper examines the role of culture in the urban development process. An abridged selection from an ongoing study of developers, activists and the politics of growth in Davis, California, it presents the case of the Target Corporation's campaign to build the first "big box" retail store in that city. I argue that Target's ability to win over the strongly slow-growth and anti-corporate community in a public referendum -- following apparently successful attempts to meet popular expectations of environmental leadership and the preservation of unique local character -- provides a clear example of how what I call cultural sincerity can …
What Is Glamour? The Production & Consumption Of A Working Aesthetic, Gordon Douglas
What Is Glamour? The Production & Consumption Of A Working Aesthetic, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
I examine here how glamour is manifested in different places and among different peoples across Los Angeles, each with different histories, cultures and aesthetics. After initially defining the concept with reference to traditional understandings using the social and spatial history of Hollywood, I develop three ideal-typical categories of glamour (glitz as glamour, status as glamour, and grit as glamour) as heuristics for looking at the many diverse ‘glamours’ to be found in Los Angeles today: from the film industry to finance, the allure of haute cuisine to the chrome of Latino car culture, the manufactured spectacle of absurdist architecture to …