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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
Mapping Staten Island: A Field Study Guide, Nerve Macaspac
Mapping Staten Island: A Field Study Guide, Nerve Macaspac
Open Educational Resources
This is a guide for the field study and urban lab as partial requirements for GEG 260 Urban Geography at CUNY College of Staten Island. The field study introduces students to spatial ethnography and offers an opportunity to observe, experience and examine a range of spatial urban phenomena that they have learned in the classroom within actually-existing urban environments. Designed as a collaborative activity, students will work in teams in exploring and examining the built environment on-site and then produce multimedia deliverables to capture their reflections throughout the field study using creative and experimental methods. The collaborative and experimental design …
Civility And Its Discontents: Subway Etiquette, Civic Values, And Political Subjectivity In Global Taiwan, Anru Lee
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people’s needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides …
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …
Super-Diversity As A Methodological Approach: Re-Centering Power And Inequality, Sofya Aptekar
Super-Diversity As A Methodological Approach: Re-Centering Power And Inequality, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
Super-diversity as a methodological lens calls for a study of dynamics of new and diversified social groups that moves away from more traditional approaches focused on ethnicity. In examining the potential of super-diversity as a methodological lens, I identify a risk of downplaying the effect of “old” categories of difference that are likely to continue to shape social structures as well as space. I propose a re-centering of power and inequality in the study of super-diversity by situating its study within an urban culturalist approach, with sociological tools borrowed from ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. This proposal is illustrated through the …
Looking Forward, Looking Back: Collective Memory And Neighborhood Identity In Two Urban Parks, Sofya Aptekar
Looking Forward, Looking Back: Collective Memory And Neighborhood Identity In Two Urban Parks, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
Collective memory and narratives of local history shape the ways people imagine a neighborhood’s present situation and future development, processes that reflect tensions related to identity and struggles over resources. Using an urban culturalist lens and a focus on collective representations of place, I compare two nearby New York parks to uncover why, despite many similarities, they support different patterns of meaning making and use. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and secondary analysis, I show that multi-vocal and fragmented contexts of collective memory help explain the uneven nature of gentrification processes, with one park serving as its cultural fulcrum while …
Visions Of Public Space: Reproducing And Resisting Social Hierarchies In A Community Garden, Sofya Aptekar
Visions Of Public Space: Reproducing And Resisting Social Hierarchies In A Community Garden, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
Urban public spaces are sites of struggles over gentrification. In increasingly diverse cities, these public spaces also host interactions among people of different class, race, ethnicity, and immigration status. How do people share public spaces in contexts of diversity and gentrification? I analyze the conflicting ways of imagining shared spaces by drawing on an ethnographic study of a community garden in a diverse and gentrifying neighborhood in New York City, conducted between 2011 and 2013. I examine how conflicts among gardeners about the aesthetics of the garden and norms of conduct reproduce larger gentrification struggles over culture and resources. Those …
Public Space--Urban Spaces Of Multiple And Diverse Publics, Antti Moelsae
Public Space--Urban Spaces Of Multiple And Diverse Publics, Antti Moelsae
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Shopping centers, hotel lobbies and - as was recently reported - McDonald's restaurants have been appropriated as social and political spaces by the public, but then encounter resistance by the owners of those spaces. Shopping centers, which have come to replace urban public space around the world, are notorious for limiting the modes of use and actively prohibiting forms of political expression. The legal status of commercial spaces that substitute for traditional public spaces is still unclear. Much of the critique of privatization of public space has been directed towards these enclosed spaces, the ownership of which is unambiguously private. …
The Amphibious Public: A Historical Geography Of Municipal Swimming And Bathing New York City, 1870 - 2013, Naomi Miriam Adiv
The Amphibious Public: A Historical Geography Of Municipal Swimming And Bathing New York City, 1870 - 2013, Naomi Miriam Adiv
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Since 1870, the city of New York has engaged in a project of building and maintaining enclosed sites for municipal bathing, including building floating `river baths' (1870 - 1942), indoor municipal baths (1901 - 1975), eleven enormous outdoor pools built with WPA funds (1936 - present), and outdoor pools of various sizes built under the Lindsay administration (1968 - present). This dissertation explores the changing rationale, over almost 150 years, for the municipal construction of public bathing places in New York City, and the ways in which the physical structures have taken on new social goals, meanings and ideals, both …