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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
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 …