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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
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.
Help-Yourself City: Market-Driven Planning And D.I.Y. Responses In Making The “Neoliberal” Streetscape, Gordon Douglas
Help-Yourself City: Market-Driven Planning And D.I.Y. Responses In Making The “Neoliberal” Streetscape, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
Since the 1970s, the consequences of global economic restructuring and the rise of free-market “neoliberal” ideologies in governance have been visible in most every arena of social life, but are perhaps nowhere more visible than in urban space. The humble bus stop, a basic element of local transit service, is today often turned over in large part to private advertising interests and in the process has become both an indicator of neglect and a symbol of the commodification of public space. This paper examines such physical manifestations of neoliberal planning policy in the urban streetscape – spatial neglect and inequality …
The Formalities Of Informal Urbanism: Technical And Scholarly Knowledge At Work In Do-It‐Yourself Urban Design, Gordon Douglas
The Formalities Of Informal Urbanism: Technical And Scholarly Knowledge At Work In Do-It‐Yourself Urban Design, Gordon Douglas
Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning
Among the numerous ways people make illegal or unauthorized alterations to urban space, of particular interest in recent years have been the creative, local, and often anonymous efforts at informal but functional “improvement” to the built environment where the state or property owners have failed to act – practices I call “do-it-yourself urban design.” Authorities, planners, and community members alike rightfully wonder about the meanings of these actions, and the questions they raise about rights, responsibilities, benefits, and consequences. Building from alarger qualitative study on DIY urban design across eleven cities, this paper focuses on the motivations, methods, and self-perceptions …
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 …