Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Big Parcels: Modernist Planning In Washington State History, Andrew M. Gardner, Becca C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

In anthropology’s spatial turn, cultural anthropologists directed portions of their attention to the spaces in which human habitation takes shape. This article concerns the large planned spaces configured in the Modernist era of the twentieth century. Utilizing a fieldwork-based methodology that draws on the ethnographic toolkit, analysis compares and contrasts three large planned spaces located in Washington State: the former site of the Northern State Mental Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, the location in central Spokane at which Expo 74 was hosted, and the rural location of the never-completed Satsop Nuclear Facility near Elma, Washington. Our analysis suggests the singular use for …

Cosmopolitanism And Urban Space In Doha, Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay commences with an ethnographic sojourn through the Industrial Area, a peripheral zone of the urban landscape in Doha, Qatar that is densely inhabited by low wage migrant laborers. In this segregated urban enclave, I ascertain the openness to alterity and the interactions with difference that connect their experiences to the conceptual legacy of cosmopolitanism. Via a discussion of the segregated experiences of transnational migrants in Doha’s urban landscape, I then stake out a speculative argument for the connection between that segregation and the resulting cosmopolitan conditions. Together, these two assertions explore manifestations of cosmopolitan urbanism in non-Western and …

Exploring The Urban Infrastructure Of Transnational Labor Migration In Nepal, Alena Mcintosh

Summer Research

This project examines the ways in which outmigration from Nepal is impacting the built landscape of Kathmandu. This project employed ethnographic methods to explore transnational labor migration through the lens of the city and the use and construction of urban spaces. While outmigration was the original focus of the project, it became clear through the research process that internal migration, the first step in the transnational migration process, plays a more direct role in the development of the city. This research was based on nineteen interviews conducted in Kathmandu as well as photo ethnography. Transnational labor migration is an exceedingly …

How The City Grows: Urban Growth And Challenges To Sustainable Development In Doha, Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter considers how sustainable development fits in the social, political, and cultural context of contemporary Doha, Qatar. After a review of sustainable development and urban development in Qatar, this chapter makes several contentions. First, it contends that sustainable development poses a challenge to the political stability of a society that distributes state-controlled wealth to its citizenry through urban development. Second, it points to the fact that Qatar's tribal/authoritarian political regime is antithetical to some of the bottom-up democratic principles thought to underpin sustainable development. Finally, it suggest that the consignment of sustainable development efforts to the spatial discourse …

People, Plants, And Fungi: Examining The Ecological And Social Landscapes Of The Swan Creek Park Food Forest, Renee Meschi

Summer Research

This summer, I researched the plants, fungi, and people of Tacoma’s Swan Creek Park Food Forest (SCPFF) in order to allow the site to tell its own story through the histories in which the local plants and people are both rooted. My overall goal was to unearth the submerged influences that have shaped the SCPFF which, in their exposure, can create an approach to sustainable community building that is inclusive of multiple cultural identities, as well as respectful of the sovereignty of those identities.

I began my investigation with plants and fungi that are indigenous to the area, with a …